Disclosed are systems and methods for providing pre-program read to counter wordline failures. A method includes performing a read operation on a first portion of a flash memory in response to an erase operation on a second portion of the flash memory, wherein the first portion comprises a plurality of logical wordlines corresponding to a plurality of physical wordlines of the second portion. The method also includes counting, for each of the plurality of logical wordlines, a number of memory cells exceeding a threshold error voltage and marking defective physical wordlines in a bitmap. The method also includes performing a write operation into a third portion of the flash memory that includes at least one physical wordline marked as defective in the error bitmap, wherein a predetermined data pattern is written to a lower page of the at least one physical wordline.