More likely:
http://www.slate.com/id/2167284/
Raging CagingWhat the heck is vote caging, and why should we care?
By Dahlia LithwickPosted Thursday, May 31, 2007, at 6:24 PM ET
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
Last week, in her testimony before the House judiciary committee,
Monica Goodling referred several times to "vote caging" possibly done
by Arkansas' soon to be ex-interim, never-confirmed U.S. Attorney Tim
Griffin. Yet Goodling was questioned about this almost not at all, nor
did the media do much more than report the words of the former liaison
between the White House and Alberto Gonzales (why a "liaison" is
required between two institutions with no boundaries between them is
incomprehensible, but perhaps another story). Meanwhile, liberal talk
radio, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the blogosphere went nuts. So, which
is it: Is vote caging the most underreported part of this U.S.
attorneys scandal or the most over-hyped?
One of the reasons the mainstream news reports (including mine) barely
touched the vote-caging story was that nobody had any idea what
Goodling was talking about. "Vote caging, what's that?" we e-mailed
each other at Slate. The confusion seemed to extend to Goodling
herself. The subject came up in her testimony about former Deputy
Attorney General Paul McNulty. In saying he had not been forthright
with the House judiciary committee in his testimony on the firing of
the U.S. attorneys, she cited three areas, one of which was McNulty's
failure "to disclose that he had some knowledge of allegations that
Tim Griffin had been involved in 'vote caging' in the president's 2004
campaign," when he spoke to Congress.
Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., asked Goodling to "explain what caging
is," clarifying that she was unfamiliar with the term. Goodling
fumbled around, muttered something about, "it's a direct-mail term,
that people who do direct mail, when, when they separate addresses
that may be good versus addresses that may be bad," then made sure to
end with, "I don't
I believe that Mr. Griffin doesn't believe that
he, that he did anything wrong there and there, there actually is a
very good reason for it, for a very good explanation." Which
explanation Goodling did not then provide.
To recap, Goodling told the judiciary committee that: 1) Griffin was
possibly involved in caging; 2) he doesn't believe he did anything
wrong (she is less certain, it seems); and 3) McNulty lied under oath
when he downplayed his knowledge of these allegations to the
committee.
That would suggest that vote caging is a big deal. Is it?
Vote caging is an illegal trick to suppress minority voters (who tend
to vote Democrat) by getting them knocked off the voter rolls if they
fail to answer registered mail sent to homes they aren't living at
(because they are, say, at college or at war). The Republican National
Committee reportedly stopped the practice following a consent decree
in a 1986 case. Google the term and you'll quickly arrive at the
Wizard of Oz of caging, Greg Palast, investigative reporter and author
of the wickedly funny Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New
OrleansSordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild.
Palast started reporting allegations of Republican vote caging for the
BBC's Newsnight in 2004. He's been almost alone on the story since
then. Palast contends, both in Armed Madhouse and widely through the
liberal blogosphere, that vote caging, an illegal voter-suppression
scheme, happened in Florida in 2004 this way:
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 andyou got to love
thisAmerican 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 vacationand the soldiers were overseas.
Palast supplies evidence linking Tim Griffin, then-research director
for the RNC, to this caging plot; specifically, a series of
confidential e-mails to Republican Party muckety-mucks with the
suggestive heading "RE: caging." The e-mails were accidentally sent to
a George Bush parody site. They also contained suggestively named
spreadsheets, headed "caging" as well. The names on the lists are what
Palast's researchers deemed to be homeless men and soldiers deployed
in Iraq. Here are the e-mails.
As Palast points outand Griffin himself has observedthe American
media barely touched this story, and Griffin has yet to explain the
e-mails or the lists. He did tell The New Yorker's Jane Mayer last
March that "caging is not a derogatory term. ... [I]t's a direct-mail
term. It derives from caging categories of mail in steel shelves and
files." Still, that hardly explains why he was allegedly caging only
transient African-American voters in those shelves or files, which
would likely violate the Voting Rights Act.
Palast is surely not above overstatement. He is one of many who have
repeated the claim that, "In an Aug. 24 e-mail, the Justice
Department's Monica Goodling wrote to Sampson, that Griffin's
nomination would face opposition in Congress because he was involved
'in massive Republican projects in Florida and elsewhere by which
Republicans challenged tens of thousand of absentee votes.
Coincidentally, many of those challenged votes were in black
precincts.' " Goodling wrote no such thing. That quote is from an
article circulated by Goodling on Aug. 24. It's an unfair smear of
both Griffin and Goodling (both of whom have proven amply capable of
smearing themselves).
Still, Palast's vote-caging claims are hardly unbelievable.
Republicans have been systematically trying to suppress minority votes
for decades, most recently calling it pushback for rampant liberal
voter fraud. Our own former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist was
alleged to have mastered the art. And while bouncing voters from the
rolls on the basis of their race violates federal law, it's not beyond
imagining that eager young "loyal Bushies" aren't all that bothered by
federal laws, especially if there's a way to bend rather than overtly
break them.
>From the point of view of the ongoing DoJ scandal, perhaps what's most
urgent about the vote-caging claims is that they go a long, long way
toward explaining why Karl Rove and Harriet Miers were so determined
to get Griffin seated in the Arkansas U.S. Attorney's office, and to
do so without a confirmation hearing. If, as the Justice Department
has continued to insist, Griffin was eminently qualified for the
position, why did he need to be spared the hearing at all costs? And
once it became clear that he would undergo a hearing, why did Griffin
sideline himself with the colorful observation that undergoing Senate
confirmation would be "like volunteering to stand in front of a firing
squad in the middle of a three-ring circus?" Griffinwho is now in job
talks with the Fred Thompson campaignsure looks like a guy hiding
something, and if vote caging is that something, it becomes even more
interesting that the White House was pushing him forward.
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Why did Goodling choose to shine a beacon on the vote-caging
allegations in her perfectly rehearsed, highly coached testimony last
week? Having slaved to secure Griffin's U.S. attorney post, why raise
the allegations against him and then subtly distance herself from him,
if there is nothing to see here? Professor Rick Hasen of Loyola Law
School, who wrote earlier this month about voter fraud, is my personal
voting-law guru. (Everyone needs one.) When I asked him whether the
mainstream media were making a mistake in blowing off the vote-caging
story, he said Goodling's mention of it "makes me suspect that there's
something there worth investigating by the MSM, even if you don't buy
into the grand conspiracy theories."
If the media have fallen down on this story, how much more so has
Congress? Nobody tried to press Goodling about what McNulty allegedly
knew and withheld from Congress in regard to Griffin's alleged
vote-caging schemes. I'd be interested in the answer. I'd also like to
hear what Griffin himself has to say about those lists the BBC has. If
the RNC was paying good money to send registered mail to homeless
black men in Florida, there must have been a reason for it. Griffin,
after all, has left his Arkansas post and is looking for work. (Tim,
if Sen. Thompson is a no-go, I need a babysitter next Saturday!) I bet
he'd like nothing better than to clear his name and remove the taint
of voter suppression from his résumé.
I'd also like to hear from Karl and Harriet about why Griffin's
elevation to the Arkansas job was so important, yet his confirmation
so fraught. If Palast is right, Griffin and vote caging open the door
to explaining the White House involvement in the U.S. attorneys purge.
And the White Housenot the Justice Departmenthas always been the
least-understood part of this story. So, let's bake up some of those
warm, crusty subpoenas. Last week was the first time most of us heard
about vote caging. It shouldn't be the last.
On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 8:39 PM, Robert Munn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> This sort of stuff is just a mess. There are similar problems with voters
> being culled from the rolls in data purges. Bureaucrats, man, bureaucrats.
>
> On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 7:31 PM, Jerry wrote:
>
>>
>> http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2008/10/28/am.costello.troops.vote.cnn
>>
>
>
>
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