This thread got locked for too many ad hominems. Let us resume but remember the rules. Let us also avoid hijacks; Bush’s National Guard record and Dan Rather’s firing are not relevant. This is about an alleged Republican plot to block minority votes in the 2004 election; also about the fact that one of the key players was recently appointed a U.S. attorney.
In Ohio some newly registered voters received certified letters from the Republican party. I was one of them. If the voter wasn’t home the postal service left the traditional card for the letter to be picked up at the post office. If that letter wasn’t picked up, the letter’s refusal was used as a basis for challenging a voter’s residence.
Here is a link to a NPR article describing how, in one county, federal judges stepped in and put a stop to the challenges. I’ll grant you that the 976 voters challenged are a pretty small drop in the bucket of a county where 270,000 voters went to the polls in 2004.
Originally quoted by Ms. McCraney:
Mr. Lou Wray, you challenged my husband, and we live in the same neighborhood. Okay? But you’ve never met us a day in our lives, hard-working individuals. My husband is a full-time student at Kent State University, where I also possess a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree. We work hard just like you do, trying to make our livings, trying to prove ourselves in this world to get to the point where we’re 80 years old, like you.
But you signed your name to 200 documents of people you have never, ever met a day in your life, challenging our right to vote. And you don’t even know whether we live… in Tallmadge, Ohio. You have no idea. Somebody just called you on the phone and asked you to do a favor and you said okay.
And now you look foolish standing up here saying, “I don’t know. They just called me on the phone. I don’t have anything.” You look silly. And we have to be inconvenienced and we have to come to work.
It may not have been an effort to stop blacks from voting, but it was an effort to stop newly registered voters. If those voters happened to skew black, it would have been de facto supression of black votes, if not de jure .
I don’t get it, from any side or political persuasion. This sort of individually targeted approach, as in the “registered letter” scam, seems unlikely to generate enough actual numbers, a few thousand here and there.
Now, the wholesale operation, like that conducted in Florida in 2000, that is a different kettle of piranha. But knocking off a couple hundred registered voters of the Disagreeable Party…why bother? Why break into a bank to steal $2?
elucidator:
I don’t get it, from any side or political persuasion. This sort of individually targeted approach, as in the “registered letter” scam, seems unlikely to generate enough actual numbers, a few thousand here and there.
Now, the wholesale operation, like that conducted in Florida in 2000, that is a different kettle of piranha. But knocking off a couple hundred registered voters of the Disagreeable Party…why bother? Why break into a bank to steal $2?
Re-read posts #45-47 in the original thread. Apparently the use of registered mail was an exception; it was mostly done through regular first-class mail.
Recent interview with Palast in Dollars & Sense magazine.
Dollars & Sense: In the new edition of your book, ARMED MADHOUSE, you report on the theft of the 2008 election. How do know what they’re doing? Any way to stop them?
Palast: I know because I have Karl Rove’s emails. No kidding. He and his team aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer. They sent copies of their plans to GeorgeWBush.ORG instead of GeorgeWBush.COM addresses — and, heh heh, they ended up in my in-box. Who says this job ain’t fun?
Dollars & Sense: Bush fired eight prosecutors. You were behind the scenes on that story long before it broke in the US. What are they still withholding from us?
Palast: Look, it’s all about VOTES. You’ll see that the prosecutor that Karl Rove insisted in putting in place is a slithery character named Tim Griffin. He’s the guy I busted as the spider-mind behind the “caging lists” which purged thousands of Black voters. The prosecutors fired, as you’ll see in Armed Madhouse, include those, like David Iglesias in New Mexico, who refused to bring phony cases of fraud against legitimate voters. It’s a matter of economics: the Republican party is systematically knocking out lower-income voters; that makes their purges racially biased — but my data show that’s just the effect of hunting down and attacking the ballot power of working class and poor voters. Disenfranchisement is class war by other means.
You were asked more than once in the other thread to further discuss Ralph Neas’ view of the illegality of the racial composition of the caging list. Or at least to *cite * it or sumpin’.
So … Got any meat for us to chew on?
All such Dopers who are resolute in ignoring that straight line are to be commended.
Couldn’t think of anything, huh?
I’m a lawyer but I’ve never been involved in a voting rights case. But I’ll take a stab at it. From wiki:
Section 2
Section 2 contains a general prohibition on voting discrimination, enforced through federal district court litigation. Congress amended this section in 1982, prohibiting any voting practice or procedure that has a discriminatory result. The 1982 amendment provided that proof of intentional discrimination is not required. The provision focused instead on whether the electoral processes is equally accessible to minority voters.[5] This section is permanent and does not require renewal.
Discussed in greater detail, with relevant case law, at p. 12 et seq. of this pdf file.
From the Department of Justice website:
Operation of the amended Section 2
the history of official voting-related discrimination in the state or political subdivision;
S.Rep. No. 97-417, 97th Cong., 2d Sess. (1982), pages 28-29.
The Judiciary Committee also noted that the court could consider additional factors, such as whether there is a lack of responsiveness on the part of elected officials to the particularized needs of minority group members or where the policy underlying the state or political subdivision’s use of the challenged standard, practice, or procedure is tenuous. However, the Judiciary Committee report describes this list of factors as neither exclusive nor comprehensive. Moreoever, a plaintiff need not prove any particular number or a majority of these factors in order to succeed in a vote dilution claim.
In its first review of a case brought under the 1982 amendment, the Supreme Court explained that the “essence of a Section 2 claim is that a certain electoral law, practice, or structure interacts with social and historical conditions to cause an inequality in the opportunities enjoyed by black and white voters to elect their preferred representatives.” Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30, 47 (1986). See also, Johnson v. DeGrandy, 512 U.S. 997 (1994).
The statute continues to prohibit state and local officials from adopting or maintaining voting laws or procedures that purposefully discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group. In a case alleging a violation of Section 2 because of a discriminatory intent, the plaintiffs musst be prepared to proved, under the test established in Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Hous. Dev. Corp, 429 U.S. 252, 264-68 (1977), that the challenged practice was adopted, at least in part, because it would harm minority voting strength, and not merely with an expectation that it would do so. See, e.g., Personnel Adm’r of Massachusetts v. Fenney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979).
Here’s the relevant text of the Act, Title 42 U.S. Code, Chapter 20:
§ 1973. Denial or abridgement of right to vote on account of race or color through voting qualifications or prerequisites; establishment of violation
(a) No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color, or in contravention of the guarantees set forth in section 1973b (f)(2) of this title, as provided in subsection (b) of this section.
What the Pubs are accused of doing with the “caging lists” certainly had racially discriminatory effects. Proving that intention on their part would not be necessary (but nor would it be difficult).
Now, the problem here is that the statute applies only to officials, and it is concerned with determining the legality of state voting requirements, not with assigning criminal penalties. The misconduct alleged by Palast was on the part of RNC and Bush campaign operatives; therefore, while it stinks, it might not be a crime. There may be other applicable laws against private citizens interfering with others’ access to the polls; I’ll try to do some research on that and get back to you.
Another relevant passage from Armed Madhouse, p. 201:
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Republicans too fielded a team in the Jim Crow “literacy test” game. But as the South was conceded to the Democrats, the GOP did its racial thing in the West. From 1958 to 1962, the Republicans used “Operation Eagle Eye” to menace Hispanic voters in Arizona to keep the wrong color folk from voting. A Republican lawyer would question every dark-skinned voter about their address and history, then read them a passage from the Constitution, challenging their right to vote if they did not provide a clear English interpretation of the passage.
“Literacy tests,” “Operation Eagle Eye,” all that was made illegal by the Voting Rights Ace of 1965.
Nevertheless, in 1981, the Republican Party toyed with mass challenges of voters. They created a caging list of 45,000 folk in Black precincts of New Jersey – and swiftly got busted. Facing prosecution, the party signed a consent decree swearing in federal court never again to play the racial profile game anywhere in the nation, so help them God.
But now, in October 2004, this political party on legal probation appeared to slide back into its old ways.
(As Palast notes later in the chapter, the Pubs might argue nothing done in 2004 violated the consent decree because the decree was signed by the national party, not the state parties.)
Assuming Palast has got this story right, particularly the part about Pubs “facing prosecution” in 1981, there must be something that criminalizes the conduct in question; I’ll also try to find something about that story. I’ll also shoot Palast an e-mail, though he probably is too busy with his book tour to answer.
davidm
May 13, 2007, 10:09am
10
This might be useful. Georgewbush.org has a page with the emails they received, including the caging lists. Here’s a link to it.
http://2004.georgewbush.org/deadletteroffice/index.asp
davidm
May 13, 2007, 10:18am
11
Greg Palast in NYC in May 2007 discussing this.
This page has images of the e-mails in question.
Well, at least the print MSM didn’t ignore this story at the time. In this post-election article in Rolling Stone –
In the months leading up to the election, Ohio was in the midst of the biggest registration drive in its history. Tens of thousands of volunteers and paid political operatives from both parties canvassed the state, racing to register new voters in advance of the October 4th deadline. To those on the ground, it was clear that Democrats were outpacing their Republican counterparts: A New York Times analysis before the election found that new registrations in traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties.(61) ‘‘The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the ground,’’ a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington Times.(62)
To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal mailings known in electioneering jargon as ‘‘caging.’’ During the Eighties, after the GOP used such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in New Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to abstain from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters(64) in sixty-five counties.(65) On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett – who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County – sought to invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67)
– I found a link to this story in WaPo, 10/29/04:
Republicans yesterday continued to challenge the validity of tens of thousands of voter registrations in Ohio and other key states in the presidential election while a coalition of civil rights and labor groups sued the GOP, contending the Republican efforts were aimed at removing eligible minority voters from the rolls.
After initially saying he would not contest a Wednesday ruling halting the challenges, Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell (R) worked with other election officials who asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit in Cincinnati to allow GOP challenges to 35,000 voters from mostly urban and minority areas to proceed before the election. As of late last night, the court had not ruled.
<snip>
The Republican challenges in Ohio, Wisconsin and other battleground states prompted civil rights and labor unions to sue in U.S. District Court in Newark, saying the GOP is violating a consent decree, issued in the 1980s by Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise and still in effect, that prevents the Republicans from starting “ballot security” programs to prevent voter fraud that target minorities.
<snip>
A similar effort by a former Nevada GOP operative to question 17,000 Democratic voters in Las Vegas was rejected earlier this month by election officials there. Republicans have also filed plans in Florida and Colorado to place watchers who can challenge voters in those key states on Election Day.
<snip>
Courts in the past found that Republicans used tactics that were aimed at intimidating minority voters and suppressing their votes. The consent decrees in New Jersey stemmed from several incidents in the 1980s.
In 1981, the Republican National Committee sent letters to predominantly black neighborhoods in New Jersey, and when 45,000 letters were returned as undeliverable, the committee compiled a challenge list to remove those voters from the rolls. The RNC sent off-duty law enforcement officials to the polls and hung posters in heavily black neighborhoods warning that violating election laws is a crime.
In 1986, the RNC tried to have 31,000 voters, most of them black, removed from the rolls in Louisiana when a party mailer was returned. The consent decrees that resulted prohibited the party from engaging in anti-fraud initiatives that target minorities or conduct mail campaigns to “compile voter challenge lists.”
Undeliverable mail is the basis for this year’s challenges in Ohio. Republicans also sent mail to about 130,000 voters in Philadelphia, another heavily black and Democratic stronghold.
Here’s a skeptical take on Palast’s story by a blogger called “DRATIONAL.”
And here’s Palast’s response. Most interesting is the last paragraph:
Otherwise, let me spend my one weekend off this month with my kids before I fly off to Washington, Michigan and London where, for BBC, I’ll be meeting with the Justice Department, Chairman Conyers and others — on an investigation even more important than ‘caging,’ persecuted prosecutors, or anything Mr. Drat can imagine … something, Mr. Drat that makes me very dangerous indeed to this regime.
I already have to present a photo ID for both federal and local elections. Am I being repressed?
According to Greg Palast, the House Judiciary Committee stumbled big and missed an important part of Goodling’s testimony – where she said Kyle Sampson lied to Congress when he denied that he had spoken with Goodling about Tim Griffin’s involvement in “caging” voters in the 2004 elections.
The key point here is the caging, which according to Palast is a go-to-jail felony. And Palast says he has emails showing that Griffin was in charge of a GOP caging operations that attempted to deny the vote to hundreds of thousands of mostly voters.
So, right there, evidence of a felony, and Palast will be happy to provide it to the Dem House Judiciary members (Pubbies, too, I 'm sure, but they probably wouldn’t be interested) if they only have the wit to ask.
Here’s the link:
Read it and weep, PUbbie apologists.
Really? I don’t. The rules vary from place to place. Palast noted in his book that in 2004 many Latino and Native American voters in New Mexico were turned away at the polls because they had “the wrong ID” – not no ID, not false ID, not somebody else’s ID, but just the wrong kind.
It’s illegal but it might not be a crime. See post #9 .
BTW, I have absolutely no objection to a national ID card – provided it’s provided to everyone for free. Charging the card-holder money for it would be a form of poll tax.
Such a card would necessarily specify whether the holder is a citizen or non-citizen – and undocumented aliens would not get the card at all. I have no problem with that, either.
Oh, don’t tease us!