Caging: What Bob Woodward doesn't know (or care) about Voter Suppression

Recently investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Jeff Leen participated in a question-and-answer session, and one participant asked them the extent of the voter suppression technique called “caging” is. Neither investigative reporter even understood what "caging" is. Think Progress offers this description of the important voter suppression technique for the rest of us.

Caging most recently gained attention in the U.S. attorney scandal. In 2004, BBC News published a report showing that Tim Griffin, the former Rove protege who was placed as a U.S. attorney in Arkansas, led a “caging” scheme to suppress the votes of African-American servicemembers in Florida.

On Nov. 5, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduced the Caging Prohibition Act, a bill to outlaw this “long-recognized voter suppression tactic which has often been used to target minority voters.” Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to dismiss this as “direct-mail term.” But the charges are serious enough that earlier this year, several senators called for an investigation into the RNC’s use of this voter suppression tactic. Whitehouse and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) explained:

Caging is a voter suppression tactic whereby a political campaign sends mail marked “do not forward” to a targeted group of eligible voters. A more aggressive version involves sending mail to a targeted group of voters with instructions to sign and return an acknowledgment card. The campaign then creates a list of those whose mail was returned undelivered and challenges the right of those citizens to vote — on the ground that the voter does not live at the registered address.

This is a powerful tool in the Republicans' voter suppression arsenal. Unless they are in strongly gerrymandered pro-Republican districts, it is very difficult for Republicans to get the majority of the votes of those who are eligible to vote and want to vote in the election. Voter suppression techniques like "Caging" are powerful tools used to prevent minorities and Democrats from participating in the election process.

Republicans don't hesitate to use "Caging" just because it is illegal. They are, after all, Republicans.

Vote Suppression is the issue

The Republican Party has stolen the Presidential election in 2000 and in 2004, and Americans are dying because of it. So are Iraqis, for that matter. But it's not just a case of misprogrammed diebold voting machines. Mostly the vote is rigged by suppressing turnout of likely Democratic voters. Buzzflash interviewed Gregg Palast:

Greg Palast: 2004. And in 2006 and 2004, they challenged tens of thousands of black soldiers. They stopped their votes from being counted when they were mailed in from Baghdad. Go to Baghdad and lose your vote -- mission accomplished.

BuzzFlash: How did they do that?

Greg Palast: By sending letters to the homes of soldiers, marked "do not forward." When they came back undelivered, they said: Aha! Illegal voter registered from a false address. And when their ballot came in from Fallujah, it was challenged. The soldier didn’t know it. Their vote was lost. Over half a million votes were challenged and lost by the Republicans -- absentee ballots. Three million voters who went to the polls found themselves challenged by the Republicans. This was not a small operation. It was a multi-million dollar, wholesale theft operation.

I’m working with Bobby Kennedy, who is a voting rights attorney. He said, “This is not just an icky, horrible thing that people do wearing white sheets. This is a felony crime.” [paraphrase] And the guy they put in charge of this criminal ring to knock out voters is a guy named Tim Griffin. Today, Tim Griffin is -- badda-bing -- U.S. Attorney for Arkansas. When they fired the honest guys, they put in the Rove-bots to fix the 2008 election. That’s what I’m saying -- it’s already being stolen, as we speak. Tim Griffin is the perpetrator who’s become the prosecutor, and that’s what’s going down right now.

This is why Tim Griffin was sent to replace Bud Cummins, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Dud Cummings was apparently too law abiding for Rove to trust to kill any investigation of vote suppression or vote stealing in Arkansas.

Of course, the Republcans don't always conduct vote suppression. Sometimes there is nothing for it but to resort purely to good, old fashion vote stealing.

Greg Palast: I have it all in Armed Madhouse - Updated Edition, including in the three new chapters. First and foremost, is that it’s not one thing. It ain’t just electronic voting, guys. You go, oh, we have paper ballots, we’re saved, we’re saved. Bulls***! Wake up! Hello! Let’s remember that in Florida and Ohio, they didn’t have computer voting. So all the stuff about Diebold -- Ohio was not stolen by computers, because they didn’t have computers there. In fact, they were thrilled when people complained about computers because they could keep the junky punch cards in. That doesn’t mean that computers are safe. As I point out in the new chapter, the Republicans held on to Katherine Harris’ seat -- and we don’t want to think too carefully about that image -- they held onto Katherine Harris’ seat with 300 votes, while 18,000 votes disappeared in the computers. So they do use computers. That was a pure, straight-up, shoplift of the Congressional seat.

BuzzFlash: A House committee just voted not to pursue an investigation of that election, despite the disappearance of 18,000 votes.

Greg Palast: That’s sick -- deeply, deviously sick. First of all, in New York and other states, when votes are in question, they simply redo them. People talk about recount -- forget it. Redo the vote. When the machines collapse, then there’s no question that there was monkey business.

BuzzFlash: Then why do you think --

Greg Palast: -- why don’t Democrats stand up?

BuzzFlash: The U.S. House of Representatives is controlled by Democrats. It’s like saying, well, $320 million is missing from a bank but we’re not going to investigate that.

Greg Palast: You’re forgetting it’s not about the two parties. Vote theft is mainly a racial issue in America, and it’s a class issue. The white caucus is a lot bigger than the black caucus. They don’t call the Congress a millionaire’s club for nothing. There aren’t many guys in there -- or women -- who are not millionaires. So it’s the millionaires versus us. It’s the white caucus versus the black caucus, which is of great concern. So the vote is along racial class and economic lines, not along party lines. Party lines are pretty much meaningless. There’s pretty much one party -- the party of the cash. But I’m not one of these people that says there’s no difference between the Democratic and Republican Party. The question is: is the difference meaningful? That’s all. When it comes down to voter issues, remember that the Democrats in power there were elected under the racist, broken, classist system. If you fix the voting system, a third of those Democrats could never win a primary. The last thing that they want is poor people to vote.

The USA is the oldest Republic existing on Earth today. It has been a two century plus experiment, and my reading of twentieth century history has suggested to me that powerful industrial societies are forced to adopt many of the characteristics of a Republic. But Bush and the conservative Republicans have been proving that the dangers to a Republic that are inherent in a powerful Chief Executive who is also Commander in Chief are very real. The five decades of WW II and the Cold War allowed the forces opposing democracy to gain a great deal of power, and the end of the Cold War did not make them want to give it up.

We are seeing the backlash against the end of the Cold War, augmented by 9/11. Terrorism is a major problem, but it is not a war, nor is it an inherent characteristic of Islamic societies. But they want to define it that way because it allows the non-democratic American nationalists to throw out the freedoms from an autocratic government that we Americans have gotten used to.

That's what this vote changing, voter suppression, vote stealing and election stealing is all about. Those given power to deal with a nuclear-armed USSR will not give up that power just because the threat is gone. They are fighting the loss of that power, but it must be taken from them. That is the lesson provided by the Bush/Cheney administration.

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See also:

• Rudi Guiliani - an example of the "new" GOP.

Goodling gave us the crime. Caging. Who will take it from here?

Greg Palast has pointed out that Monica Goodling gave up the real crime at the core of Department of Justice antics. (See Bradblog.) The key is "Caging." The following is from a letter from Greg Palast published in Bradblog:

Goodling testified that Gonzales' Chief of Staff, Kyle Sampson, perjured himself, lying to the committee in earlier testimony. The lie: Sampson denied Monica had told him about Tim Griffin's "involvement in 'caging' voters" in 2004.

Huh?? Tim Griffin? "Caging"??? [Snip]

...what's 'caging' and why is it such a dreadful secret that lawyer Sampson put his license to practice and his freedom on the line to cover Tim Griffin's involvement in it? Because it's a felony. And a big one.

Here's how caging worked, and along with Griffin's thoughtful emails themselves you'll understand it all in no time.

The Bush-Cheney operatives sent hundreds of thousands of letters marked "Do not forward" to voters' homes. Letters returned ("caged") were used as evidence to block these voters' right to cast a ballot on grounds they were registered at phony addresses. Who were the evil fakers? Homeless men, students on vacation and --- you got to love this --- American soldiers. Oh yeah: most of them are Black voters.

Why weren't these African-American voters home when the Republican letters arrived? The homeless men were on park benches, the students were on vacation --- and the soldiers were overseas. Go to Baghdad, lose your vote. Mission Accomplished.

How do I know? I have the caging lists...

I have them because they are attached to the emails Rove insists can't be found. I have the emails. 500 of them --- sent to our team at BBC after the Rove-bots accidentally sent them to a web domain owned by our friend John Wooden.

Here's what you need to know --- and the Committee would have discovered, if only they'd asked:

1. 'Caging' voters is a crime, a go-to-jail felony.
2. Griffin wasn't "involved" in the caging, Ms. Goodling. Griffin, Rove's right-hand man (right-hand claw), was directing the illegal purge and challenge campaign. How do I know? It's in the email I got. Thanks. And it's posted below. [Note: go to Bradblog for this. Editor, PPS.]
3. On December 7, 2006, the ragin', cagin' Griffin was named, on Rove's personal demand, US Attorney for Arkansas. Perpetrator became prosecutor.

The committee was perplexed about Monica's panicked admission and accusations about the caging list because the US press never covered it. That's because, as Griffin wrote to Goodling in yet another email (dated February 6 of this year, and also posted below), their caging operation only made the news on BBC London: busted open, Griffin bitched, by that "British reporter," Greg Palast.

This is the next step in opening up the "caging" issue. It's not over by a long shot.

But why have the American media not picked up on it? Too complicated for them?

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Prior related posts.

• "Caging" in Republican practice
  May 24, 2007


• "Caging" - an explanation of the term
  May 23, 2007

"Caging" in Republican practice

Greg Palast describes the way Republicans have used "Caging Lists" to challenge voters and suppress the vote of minorities and the poor. The trick is that if they discourage a hundred Black voters from voting, they may have lost 10 votes but their opponents will have lost 90.

Palast's article is a bit dated, having been published June 23, 2006. The VRA was reauthorized and signed into law by Bush on July 27, 2006 for another 25 years, so it remains effective for those jurisdictions it previously applied to. That means that it remains illegal to identify voters by race in order to challenge their right to vote.

That includes targeting districts with a high concentration of African-American voters, sending out registered letters to the registered voters in that district, then challenging those who do not respond or who do not pick up their letters. Registered letters are often used by bill collectors, so people behind on their bills rarely pick up registered letters from unknown addresses. This is not a reliable way to find who has moved, nor is that the purpose. It is just a way of challenging voters who are likely to vote Democratic.

Such practices are going to be quite common in November 2008, illegal or not. Unfortunately, such practices are not nearly as effective for likely Republican voters. It works when used on those minority voters who the Republicans are clearly out to get, such as African-Americans, immigrants, Hispanics, and homosexuals. Except for Republicans in general, there are no such minority groups actively threatened by Democrats.

"Caging" - an explanation of the term

Monica Goodling used the term "caging" in her testimony this morning, and at one site I read the term was described as committing a crime. Monica was probably not using the term in its criminal sense.

"Caging" has two meanings. First, it is a term used in direct mail operations to describe the process of opening, sorting, and coding donor mail and correspondence. The coding creates a "caging list" which is the organized data that is then given to the organization using the services of the direct mail contractor. That processed information is used to update the customer's lists.

The second meaning of "caging" is a form of voter suppression. It is a term that describes the process of challenging the validity of the voter registration of a voter so that they are required to prove they are registered before their vote will be counted. Wikipedia offers this description of the use of "caging" to suppress voter turnout:

Voters targeted by caging are often the most vulnerable: those who are unfamiliar with their rights under the law, and those who cannot spare the time, effort, and expense of proving that their registration is valid. Ultimately, caging works by dissuading a voter from casting a ballot, or by ensuring that they cast a provisional ballot, which is less likely to be counted.

With one type of caging, a political party sends registered mail to addresses of registered voters. If the mail is returned as undeliverable - because, for example, the voter refuses to sign for it, the voter isn't present for delivery, or the voter is homeless - the party uses that fact to challenge the registration, arguing that because the voter could not be reached at the address, the registration is fraudulent. It is this use of direct mail caging techniques to target voters which probably resulted in the application of the name to the political tactic.

On the day of the election, when the voter arrives at the poll and requests a ballot, an operative of the party challenges the validity of their registration.

While the challenge process is prescribed by law, the use of broad, partisan challenges is controversial. For example, in the United States Presidential Election of 2004, the Republican Party employed this process to challenge the validity of tens of thousands of voter registrations in contested states like Florida, Nevada, Ohio, and Wisconsin. The Republican Party argued that the challenges were necessary to combat widespread voter fraud. The Democratic Party countered that the challenges were tantamount to voter suppression, and further argued that the Republican Party had targeted voter registrations on the basis of the race of the voter, in violation of federal law.

This form of voter suppression obviously works a lot better on people who do not routinely carry a variety of forms of ID and who find it difficult to get time off from work to take care of personal matters, so the Republicans tend to use it to reduce Democratic voter turnout.

I seriously doubt that Monica Goodling was using the term "caging" in its second meaning as she was testifying before the House Committee this morning.