We have shocking news this week from CNN: Trump is preparing to illegally purge tens of millions of Democratic voters from voter rolls nationally, just in time for the election. Just like Modi did to win overwhelmingly in India, following the GOP’s playbook.This follows John Roberts and Sam Alito blatantly using phony, cooked numbers to justify eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, lying to our faces and then laughing at us like they did with the Dobbs decision and Citizens United.Russian dictator Joseph Stalin is often quoted (perhaps apocryphally) as saying:“It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.”Today’s GOP version of that could be:“It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s how many people we can remove from the voting rolls that will decide the election.”In this year’s iteration, the Trump Department of Justice has demanded that all states turn over their voting rolls, complete with names, addresses, driver’s license and social security numbers, voting history, and date of birth.They’re also requiring states to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” that says the states will then purge from their voting rolls anybody who Republican partisans within the Trump administration — once they’ve dug into the state’s voter data — find to be a “concern”:“You agree therefore that within forty-five (45) days of receiving that notice from the Justice Department of any issues, insufficiencies, inadequacies, deficiencies, anomalies, or concerns, your state will clean its VRL/Data by removing ineligible voters…”We’ve seen this movie before, but always in the past on the state level.In the 2000 election, for example, Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Secretary of State Katherine Harris requested a list of Texas felons from Texas Governor George W. Bush’s Department of Corrections. She then ran that list of Texas felons — more than 50% Hispanic and Black — against the Florida voter roll list.The result, as BBC reporter Greg Palast told the world and our media largely ignored, was that in the months just before the 2000 election, around 80,000 mostly-Black and Hispanic fully-legally-eligible but also mostly Democratic-voting Floridians were purged from that state’s voting rolls. Thousands of Black and brown voters whose first and last names just happened to be the same as Texas felons; lots of Jose Garcias and James Browns.When those Florida voters showed up on election day, they were turned away and George W. Bush “won” the election by 537 votes after his father’s corrupt SCOTUS appointee, Clarence Thomas, became the deciding vote in Bush v Gore that violated the 10th Amendment by stopping the state-supreme-court-ordered recount that would have revealed the scam and given the 2000 election to Al Gore.Some GOP-run states are happily going along with Trump’s purge effort. So far, the Trump toadies have hoovered up the intimate details on tens of millions of voters living in Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming, and the feds have obtained simple voter identity and voting history information from Colorado, Florida, Pennsylvania, Utah, and West Virginia.Sometime between now and the election, the DOJ will present to these states the lists of voters they must purge, per the Memorandum of Understanding. And the 30 or so mostly Democratic-run states which are refusing are all in the crosshairs of a massive federal lawsuit trying to force them to comply.As Greg Palast and I have documented in the past, if around 4 million legal American citizen voters hadn’t been purged from the rolls in the months leading up to the 2024 election, Kamala Harris would be president today and Democrats would control the House and perhaps even the Senate. Using the phony rubric of voter fraud, purging voter rolls has been, since the 1960s, a go-to strategy the GOP borrowed from the old Confederacy.What’s truly astonishing is how little attention is being paid to how Republicans are pre-rigging this fall’s election, both by the DNC and our mainstream media. As Dissent in Bloom documents, twelve states have already passed statewide versions of the SAVE America Act:“New Voter ID laws in AL, AZ, FL, GA, KS, LA, MS, NH, OH, SD, UT and WY restrict voter access without a secondary form of ID or a passport. About 146 million Americans don’t have a passport. Millions more do not readily have access to their birth certificates.”This is a large part of how Putin cemented single-party-rule in Russia, by carefully controlling who’s on and who’s purged from that country’s voting rolls.