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Banned
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Originally Posted by djtestudo
I would just like to make two points.
1) Nobody should be shocked by the results of this poll, legit or not. Journalists, as part of their job, are supposed to bring about change, which makes it obvious that a majority would lean liberal (and therefore Democrat).
2) Host is asking the wrong question in the opening post. Instead of asking something about journalistic integrity towards those who donated Republican, we should, if anything, be questioning the integrity of all. They are donating money, and therefore have a vested interest, in a certain party.
3) I don't know why I'm responding to this, because this is simply another in a long (no pun intended) series of posts by Host that show a complete lack of objectivity in his ability to comment on political affairs. Anyone who is this virulent in their attacks on one side while downplaying or even ignoring past and present sins by the other should not get as much attention as he does.
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djestudo, just as I believe that the priority of journalists is to report current events and their background in a reliable way..... I think that it is difficult to do so if one is lacking in integrity or cannot report reliably because of personal bias.....I attempt to follow the same standards in my posts to this forum.
Just as the work product of the media enters the stream of the competition of ideas and opinions, so too do the content of each of our posts to this forum.
I have nearly a three year "record", here, now. I think that my "record", aka my "rep" is "made" or "broken", not by how partisan you decide that I am, but by the reliability of what I post, vs. what we learn later.....the "outcome" that unfolds in the "fullness of time".
....and, of course....I am "saddled" with the "bias" that is my inspiration to expend the effort to post on the subjects that I post about. I have to be "moved"....to be emotionally affected. I endeavor to counter my emotional bias that moves me to post, by finding, editing, and posting the supporting information for my opinions. You have no idea how numerous the opinions that inspire me to post about, are....but are not posted because the depth of supporting details for them cannot be found to satisfy my editorial standards.
I end up posting opinions that are least difficult to support.
Instead of the "blanket" dismissal of my "contribution" to this forum that you've recently posted, why not hone in on one of my opinions that you decide is least difficult to challenge....and then post to refute it. We could actually engage in a political discussion....that way....
Much of what I post is my "take" on what is happening in "real time". An example is....I posted in 2004 that the government claims that Saddam had WMD and active WMD programs that constituted a threat that justified invasion and "regime change" were contrived and false. I posted when Scooter Libby was indicted, in Oct., 2005, that he obstructed justice in an attempt to stop the progress of the DOJ special counsel's CIA Plame leak investigation, and he was convicted of doing just that.....
I posted many supported opinions of the idea that Bush is a war criminal, and now the case for that argument has never been stronger or more widely supported. I posted my concern that NIST was not committed to issuing a timely, reliable report as to why WTC 7 collapsed on 9/11, into it's own footprint. I pointed out that NIST had decided not to increase it's staff to perform the investigations of the collapse of the 3 major WTC towers, even though the events were....and still are....unprecedented.
Today....NIST is two years late in releasing it's WTC report....compared to what is claimed was it's "final report", issued in summer, 2005, excluding WTC 7.
....and I pointed out....do you remember....that the republican party methodically used "race" as a divisive, criminal, and cynical way to win elections, since it could not win them by attracting enough votes on the strength of appeal of it's political platform. I posted that I believed that Maryland republican senate candidate, Michael Steele, had to know about republican racial political strategy, but was a republican, anyway, IMO, to the detriment of his character and reputation.
Can you tell me how I could post "both sides" of the following, and how it might be more "reliable" that way? Please read the OP of my new thread, contrasting the treatment of ex-Gov. Siegelman vs. that of high profile republican convicts, and post your appraisal of my "bias"?
Do you believe that all opinions are of equal weight....merit....reliability? I believe that my opinion is only as strong as the support that I can accompany it with.
Here's where we are since one of our last exchanges......considering the following, does Michael Steele seem more principled....supporting the republican party....or less.....or, for that matter, do you...... in hindsight....for supporting his candidacy?
Back on March 14. 2006...on this thread: http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...8&postcount=14 ....
....you and I posted this exchange:
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Originally Posted by host
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=102077
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Originally Posted by djtestudo
I think the problem with what you are saying about a "GOP base" is that it is like saying the Democratic base is ultraliberal communists who burn SUV dealerships and believe anyone who says the words "US military" in a positive tone is a babykilling imperialist.
I personally believe racism DOES still exist, mostly because it is impossible to eliminate something like that while we are all still human. However, I don't think that it exists to the extent many would like us to believe.
It can definately cross party lines as well. In Maryland, as an example, the Democrats have spent forty years telling the black voters in Baltimore and PG County that they are the party for them, when the highest office held in the state's history by a black person is our Republican Lieutenent Governer, who is also running for Senate against two Democrats: a white guy the party is backing, and a black guy they are trying their damndest to ignore.
The point is, it is both parties that are using minorities for thier own purposes, so to single out the Republicans is to show extreme bias in thinking.
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djtestudo...before I invest in what it is required to reply to you in detail, I want to remind you that the last time that I responded to your reference to a Maryland politician, I received no reply from you....
here: http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...do#post2019672
If you were African American, how does Michael Steele compare to John Lewis, and how do you supose the recent "record" of the Bush administration and the effort, on a local level, to push through new "Jim Crow" voting laws, "play" to African Americans?
Is it your position that John Lewis, permits Democrats, to "use" him, in any way that is similar to the "poster boy", role that Steele is used to playing?...... |
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Originally Posted by djestudo
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpost.php?p=2026364&postcount=16
Sorry host, but it appears that only one of those articles has any remote bering on what I said, and that is only because it involves the state of Maryland.
Even if you didn't want to talk about Michael Steele, it still also ignores the main point that you seem to be ignoring, that if you want to say one side is using blacks for their own purposes without bringing the other side into it as well then there is no sense discussing this further.
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<b>djestudo</b>, do you think that the candidacy of Michael Steele demonstrates that republicans are the party of "equal opportunity", and that the lack of elected black Maryland candidates to high offices, considering the following reporting....which was not widely known or known in such depth at the time of our last discussion....strengthens...or weakens your argument that "both parties" fail in anywhere near a similar way....to sincerely represent the interests of all of their members?
Quote:
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003523.php
Cage Match: Did Griffin Try to Disenfranchise African-American Voters in 2004?
By Paul Kiel - June 26, 2007, 11:21 AM
For years, Tim Griffin, the former aide to Karl Rove who’s been at the center of the U.S. attorney controversy, has been dogged by allegations that he was a part of a 2004 scheme to block African-Americans in Florida from voting.
As Greg Palast first reported for the BBC, an August, 2004 email sent to a number of Republican National Committee operatives contained a spreadsheet of the names and addresses of more than 1,800 voters in Duval County, Florida, a mostly white county that includes the city of Jacksonville. Palast reported that the addresses were located in mostly black neighborhoods, and his story, followed by others posted this year on his website and the Brad Blog, alleged that the list was compiled in order to challenge African-American voters at the polls. We sought to test that conclusion through our own analysis of the data.
The result? Our comparative analysis of the spreadsheet with Duval County voter rolls shows that most names were of African-Americans. (For more on the analysis, see below.) Such a finding, voting rights experts told me, strengthened allegations that Griffin, working for the Republican National Committee, was involved in an effort to target African-American voters. “It is difficult to explain other than an effort to target Democrats and by extension, minority voters,” Toby Moore, a former political geographer with the Justice Department, said.
Michael McDonald, an Associate Professor at George Mason University and an expert on elections statistics, said that the chance that the list is randomly so different from the population is less than 1 in 10,000. It is illegal to target voters based on their race under the Voting Rights Act. Griffin resigned earlier this month as the U.S. attorney for Little Rock after a six-month stint.
The allegations stem from two emails sent to and from Griffin in August of 2004, when he was working as the Research Director for the Republican National Committee. The subject line of the emails was “caging” and attached was a spreadsheet with the names and addresses of 1,835 voters in Duval County. A woman working for the Republican Party of Florida seems to have prepared the spreadsheet, which she sent to Griffin and other RNC researchers, as well as Brett Doster, the executive director of the Bush-Cheney Florida 2004 re-election campaign. You can see the emails here and the spreadsheet here (Excel file).
The emails came to light because they were mistakenly sent to bdoster@georgewbush.org instead of at the correct domain, georgewbush.com, which is operated by the RNC. John Wooden, who owns and operates the parody site georgewbush.org, turned over the emails to Greg Palast of the BBC. Wooden told me that no one has challenged the authenticity of the emails.
In October of that year, Palast reported that the emails contained “names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.” In response to Palast’s questions about the list, a spokesperson for the Florida GOP explained that it was “a listing of returned mail that came from a mailing that the Republican National Committee sent to new registrants in Duval County in Florida, encouraging newly registered Republicans, Democrats and Independents to vote Republican.”
Democrats alleged that the list was generated to challenge voters on Election Day. It was a tactic Republicans had tried before – generating such a list by sending mail stamped "do not forward" to voters. Voters might then be challenged at the polls based on their residency.
The tactic has become known as “vote caging” as a result of Palast’s story. The term “caging” is actually, as Griffin has argued in his defense, a direct marketing term that simply describes the processing of returns from a mailing. (Mal Warwick, who’s worked as a direct mail consultant since 1979, said that the term derives from old postal “cages,” the hundreds of cubby holes that fronted postal desks for sorting. Those who sorted the mail were called “cagers.”) None of the six voting rights experts consulted on this story had otherwise heard or seen the term used to describe the generation of challenge lists – though all six said that Republicans had used such a tactic repeatedly over the past twenty-five years. Such efforts, said Chandler Davidson, Professor Emeritus at Rice University and an expert on the history of voter suppression, have traditionally gone under the banner of "ballot security" initiatives.
In response to Palast’s story, the Republican spokeswoman denied in a statement that the list had been generated in order to challenge voters. But she went on to argue that Jacksonville “has been affected by massive fraud efforts this year as a result of the work of ACORN, a third party organization supporting the Kerry campaign and the Democrats.”
Joe Rich, who was chief of the voting rights section in the Civil Rights Division at the time, said that in response to Palast’s piece, a Justice Department lawyer was dispatched to speak to Republican Party officials and Florida and Duval County elections officials. An agreement resulted, Rich said, that Republicans would not challenge voters at the polls based on such a list. Rich said he didn’t recall hearing after the election that any such challenges had occurred.
In order to determine whether the “caging” list was composed disproportionately of African-Americans, TPMmuckraker compared the names with the 2007 voter rolls from Duval County. We were able to match 1,159 of the 1,835 names (see the matches here).
Here are the results:
<img src="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/images/tpm-caging.jpg">
As you can see, most of those on the list were Democrats and most of those were African-American. 57.8% of Duval County voters voted for Bush in the 2004 election. On the other hand, while the list is composed disproportionately of African-Americans, our analysis of the zip codes showed that the mailing was not sent exclusively to predominantly African-American neighborhoods.
Prof. McDonald, who noted the vanishingly low chance of these results being a random sample, observed that there might be a number of alternate explanations for the racial skew. If, for example, the list was generated in response to a mailing to new registrants as Republicans have argued, the skew might result from a disproportionate number of those new registrants being African-American Democrats. The results, he said, do not provide “a smoking gun” of a Republican attempt at voter suppression.
That said, Griffin’s defense against Palast’s allegations have tended to be off point. Speaking two weeks ago, Griffin focused on the term “caging,” saying that it’s simply a direct mail term. “I didn’t cage votes, I didn’t cage mail, I didn’t cage animals,” he added. The allegations that he was involved in voter suppression, he said, were “ridiculous” and “so untrue” that he couldn’t even respond to a question about them:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeDrHjagQCk&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Etpmmuckraker%2Ecom%2Farchives%2F003523%2Ephp">Click Here to Watch Griffin's Response on You Tube</a>
But as Greg Gordon of McClatchy reported last weekend, the Republican tactic of generating challenge lists is an old one, one they even used in 2004 in Ohio. In 1982, a federal judge in New Jersey issued a consent decree banning the targeting of racial minorities with challenge lists; Democrats have since alleged numerous times that Republicans have broken that decree. The allegation, then, is far from “ridiculous.” And Griffin still hasn't provided an explanation as to why he, then the RNC's head of opposition research, was copied on the email. If the "caging" list was really nothing more than a catalogue of returned mail, why were senior Republican officials concerning themselves with such clerical matters?
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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/17303.html
Posted on Sun, Jun. 24, 2007
Ex-Justice official accused of aiding scheme to scratch minority voters
Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: June 25, 2007 02:27:02 PM
WASHINGTON — Four days before the 2004 election, the Justice Department’s civil rights chief sent an unusual letter to a federal judge in Ohio who was weighing whether to let Republicans challenge the credentials of 23,000 mostly African-American voters.
The case was triggered by allegations that Republicans had sent a mass mailing to mostly Democratic-leaning minorities and used undeliverable letters to compile a list of voters potentially vulnerable to eligibility challenges.
In his letter to U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott of Cincinnati, Assistant Attorney General Alex Acosta argued that it would "undermine" the enforcement of state and federal election laws if citizens could not challenge voters’ credentials.
Former Justice Department civil rights officials and election watchdog groups charge that his letter sided with Republicans engaging in an illegal, racially motivated tactic known as "vote-caging" in a state that would be pivotal in delivering President Bush a second term in the White House.
Acosta’s letter is among a host of allegedly partisan Justice Department voting rights positions that could draw scrutiny on Capitol Hill in the coming weeks as congressional Democrats expand investigations sparked by the firing of at least nine U.S. attorneys.
Acosta, now the U.S. attorney in Miami, said in a statement that his letter was aimed at advising the court that a new Ohio law allowing challenges was "permissible," so long as no challenge was based on race. He said it also was intended to make clear that anyone whose eligibility was questioned had a right to file a provisional ballot.
Justice Department spokeswoman Cynthia Magnuson said that the Civil Rights Division "does not coordinate actions with any political party" and that any such suggestion would be "entirely unfounded."
But Robert Kengle, former deputy chief of the department’s Voting Rights Section who served under Acosta, said the letter amounted to "cheerleading for the Republican defendants."
"It was doubly outrageous," he said, "because the allegation in the litigation was that these were overwhelmingly African-American voters that were on the challenge list."
Joseph Rich, a former chief of the department's Voting Rights Section, called the Ohio scheme "vote caging."
Acosta declined during the weekend to say whether Hans von Spakovsky, the division’s voting counsel at the time, had any role in writing the letter. Von Spakovsky has been besieged with allegations of partisanship as he tries to win Senate confirmation to a full term on the Federal Election Commission.
Federal courts and Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell ultimately barred Republicans from posing the challenges in a frenzied legal battle that ran up to election eve.
The House Judiciary Committee plans soon to begin examining whether the Civil Rights Division took positions in support of a Republican agenda to suppress the votes of poor and elderly minorities who tend to vote for Democrats, said an aide to the panel who requested anonymity because the new line of inquiry has yet to be announced officially. It’s not yet clear whether the examination will include vote caging.
The tactic entails sending mail stamped "do not forward" to voters’ homes and requiring a return receipt. Voters who do not sign for the letters or postcards can then be challenged at the polls or in pre-election hearings on grounds such as whether they meet legal residency or age requirements.
J. Gerald Hebert, a head of the Voting Rights Section in the early 1990s and now executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, says the tactic is unfair for multiple reasons: it is often racially motivated; voters may be out of town or refuse to sign return receipts on letters from the GOP, and addresses may be inaccurate.
Rich said that challenges of caged voters have been stopped when brought to light before an election. The question is, he said, whether caging and subsequent challenges have occurred "and somebody didn’t bring it to light."
The new Ohio law permitted challenges in 2004 but required political parties to list targeted voters in advance of the election. The Ohio Republican Party notified election authorities in the fall of 2004 that it planned to challenge more than 35,000 voters at the polls, a figure it later trimmed to 23,000.
Democrats sued in Cincinnati to block the challenges and before U.S. District Judge Dickinson Debevoise in Newark, N.J., who had issued a consent decree barring the tactic in 1982 after finding the GOP illegally targeted minority voters in the state’s gubernatorial race the previous year.
The Justice Department was not a party to either case. Nor did Judge Dlott solicit the federal government’s views. But Acosta weighed in anyway.
Challenges, he wrote, "help strike a balance between ballot access and ballot integrity."
Republicans’ use of caging has been a contentious issue ever since Debevoise’s ruling 26 years ago. In 1986, the judge found that Louisiana Republicans had violated the consent decree. In 1990, another consent decree was issued after the Republican Party of North Carolina and the re-election campaign of Republican Sen. Jesse Helms sent 125,000 postcards to mostly black voters to compile a list of voters to challenge.
Nor was Ohio the only scene of an alleged GOP caging scheme in 2004. Former Republican National Committee and White House operative Tim Griffin has been dogged by allegations that he tried to cage mostly African-American voters in Jacksonville, Fla. Rich said that scheme became public before the election and Republicans did not pursue challenges.
Last week, Democratic Sens. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island sought an internal Justice Department investigation into whether department officials knew about Griffin’s alleged caging before he was named interim U.S. attorney for Arkansas. Griffin, who has denied any impropriety, resigned that post earlier this month.
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.......Emails released as part of the U.S. attorney firings investigation show that Griffin and Department officials remained aware of the allegations – allegations which Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) made clear would be a factor were Griffin nominated for the U.S. attorney spot.
Even with Griffin's resignation, the controversy continues. Two weeks ago, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Ted Kennedy (D-MA) <a href="http://whitehouse.senate.gov/record.cfm?id=277168">wrote</a> the Justice Department’s inspector general and head of the Office of Professional Responsibility, the two offices conducting a wide-ranging investigation of the U.S. attorney firings and other politicization at the Department, to ask that they probe the allegations.
Will Thomas contributed reporting to this story, and Tanvir Vahora and Zachary Fryer-Biggs provided research.....
.....<h3>Update: Do Democratic Party officials do anything similar? In response to a question about whether Dem officials (particularly opposition researchers) ever email around lists of newly registered voters who've responded to mailings, DNC spokeswoman Karen Finney said "absolutely not." Finney added:
"The list of tools that the GOP has used to try and enhance their electoral prospects at the expense of our right to vote reads like a shameful litany from past eras: restricting access to voter registration, improper attempts to purge voter lists, the use of voting machines that leave no verifiable audit trails, criminal phone jamming schemes, discriminatory voter ID laws, inconsistently administered elections, and now we find out, politicizing the Department of Justice."
</h3>
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Quote:
http://whitehouse.senate.gov/record.cfm?id=277168
June 18, 2007
Alberto Gonzales
Attorney General
United States Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530
Dear Attorney General Gonzales:
We write to request that the Department of Justice promptly investigate allegations that the Republican National Committee engaged in “vote caging” during the 2004 elections. We also ask that you investigate whether any Department officials were aware of allegations that Tim Griffin had engaged in caging when he was appointed United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, and whether appropriate action was taken. Caging is a reprehensible voter suppression tactic, and it may also violate federal law and the terms of applicable judicially enforceable consent decrees.
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. There are many reasons why registered mail might be “returned to sender” that have nothing to do with a voter’s eligibility. A voter might be an active member of the armed forces and stationed far from home, or a student registered at his parents’ address. Even a typographical error during entry of the voter’s registration information might result in an address that appears invalid.
The Republican Party has a long and ignominious record of caging – much of it focused on the African American community. For example, in 1981 the RNC sent a mass mailing into predominantly African American neighborhoods in New Jersey and used the resulting 45,000 letters marked “undeliverable” to challenge those voters’ eligibility. In 1986, the RNC used similar tactics in an effort to disenfranchise roughly 31,000 voters, most of them African American, in Louisiana. These tactics led to litigation and the RNC’s eventual signing of two consent decrees, still in effect, which bar the RNC from using “ballot security” programs ostensibly intended to prevent voter fraud as a tactic to target minority voters.
In 2004, however, allegations of caging by Republican officials arose again – this time over an effort to suppress votes in Florida. Emails sent in August 2004 by Tim Griffin, then Research Director and Deputy Communications Director of the RNC, demonstrate his knowledge and approval of a spreadsheet listing caged voters in predominantly African American neighborhoods in Jacksonville, Florida. (See attached.) Two years later, Mr. Griffin was appointed, without Senate confirmation, as United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Such actions appear plainly to violate the consent decrees signed by the RNC in 1981 and 1986. We ask that you investigate whether in these circumstances Mr. Griffin or others may also have violated the Voting Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act, the mail fraud statute, or any other federal statute.
It also appears that high-ranking officials in the Department knew of Mr. Griffin’s involvement in caging. Monica Goodling recently testified to the House Judiciary Committee that she discussed concerns about Mr. Griffin’s involvement in caging with Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty during a session to prepare for Mr. McNulty’s Congressional testimony. It is very disturbing to think that Department officials may have approved the appointment of a United States Attorney knowing that he had engaged in racially targeted vote caging.
Moreover, it is very disturbing to think that senior officials were aware of this practice and did nothing to refer their information to relevant officials within the Department for investigation and a determination as to whether it was a violation of a consent decree or law within the Department’s jurisdiction to enforce.
We, therefore, ask the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility to conduct an investigation to determine who in DOJ knew about Mr. Griffin’s potentially unlawful activity before he was named interim U.S. Attorney, and whether appropriate action was taken on that knowledge, and to recommend whatever action is appropriate.
At a time when the Department’s political independence and its commitment to enforcement of civil rights statutes have been called into doubt, it is vitally important that the Department thoroughly investigate these allegations of unlawful voter suppression, and the apparent failure of Department employees to forward to the appropriate authorities information they had about this practice.
Sincerely,
Edward M. Kennedy Sheldon Whitehouse
United States Senator United States Senator
cc: Paul D. Clement, Solicitor General
Alice S. Fisher, Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division
Wan J. Kim, Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division
Glenn A. Fine, Inspector General
H. Marshall Jarrett, Director, Office of Professional Responsibility
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Oct28.html
GOP Challenging Voter Registrations
Civil Rights Groups Accuse Republicans Of Trying to Disenfranchise Minorities
By Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writer
<h3>Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A05</h3>
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.
Also yesterday, Republicans in Wisconsin attempted to challenge the registrations of 5,600 voters in Milwaukee but were turned down in a unanimous decision by the city's bipartisan election board.
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.
Judith A. Browne, acting co-director of the Advancement Project, which filed the lawsuit along with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said the Republican "challenges were, and currently are, used to disenfranchise minority voters."
But Republicans denied that they were targeting black voters. Bobby Burchfield, an attorney for the Republican National Committee, told Debevoise that "troubling reports" of fictitious names such as Mary Poppins appearing on Ohio's rolls prompted the challenges.
Debevoise, who scheduled a hearing for Monday, expressed concern that widespread challenges on the fear of fraud could unnecessarily disrupt polling places.
The legal maneuvering is a testament to the legalization of presidential politics that resulted from the bitterly disputed presidential contest in 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore, which deadlocked in Florida. Both parties have embarked on litigation over voting rules in many states and have thousands of lawyers poised for Election Day.
The move in Milwaukee, a heavily minority and Democratic stronghold, is part of a national effort by Republicans in many battleground states to challenge voter registrations.
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.
Challenge rules vary by state. In general, challengers must supply evidence that the voter may not be eligible. Grounds can include that a voter is not a U.S. citizen, is not a resident of the state or county where he or she is registered, or is younger than 18. The complaints are settled by election board members or precinct judges.
Republicans argue that their program -- the most robust in recent history -- is necessary because unprecedented voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning interest groups have produced thousands of phony registrations. But Democrats say that the GOP's Milwaukee challenges are a perfect example of the party trying to imply fraud where none exists. Lawyers for John F. Kerry's campaign successfully argued before the election board there that the analysis the GOP used to challenge voters was riddled with mistakes.
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.
The civil rights groups and labor unions, which are backed by the Democratic Party, also charged that GOP plans to put challengers in thousands of precincts nationwide on Election Day are race-based. In several Florida counties, for instance, GOP challengers will disproportionately be based in black precincts.
Republicans said their plans involve putting challengers in precincts won handily by either Bush or Gore and has nothing to do with race.
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Quote:
http://www.epluribusmedia.org/featur...vote_2004.html
Voter Suppression
Mark Johnston
June 26, 2007
http://www.epluribusmedia.org/featur..._2004_pg2.html
........Why is Griffin's role in caging important? Griffin was the RNC's Research Director and Deputy Communications Director. His receipt of the caging list, at the very minimum, documents RNC involvement in caging voters. Because the process of caging preferentially acquired minority names and addresses, the subsequent use of caging lists to challenge voters at the polls may have violated the 1982 consent decree preventing voter suppression efforts aimed minority voters. That Griffin and other RNC staff were involved in the Jacksonville caging efforts is an ironic counterpoint to sworn declaration of Deputy RNC Chairman Maria Cino in the Ohio caging case, where she told the judge that the RNC was not "involved" in any efforts to remove qualified voters from the voter rolls.
Griffin's involvement in caging during the 2004 elections has certainly been a cause for concern relating to his appointment as interim AG in Arkansas as well as to the motivations off the DOJ and White House in their Prosecutor Purge. Caging warrants the attention the highest levels of government and concerned citizens – since it has been notoriously used to suppress minority votes in the past. Clearly, further investigation focusing on the 2004 RNC’s and Bush-Cheney campaign’s role in caging both in Ohio and in Duval County, Florida will help ensure that racially biased voter suppression schemes are not a part of our political process.
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Last edited by host; 06-29-2007 at 10:14 AM..
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