Why Dems Will Have To Make Election Oversight a Top Priority: the BushiteRight

AlterNet

Democrats Fail in Election Oversight

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet May 29, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/52383/

On Tuesday at a long-awaited hearing on the recent purge of federal
prosecutors, Monica Goodling, the former top-ranking Justice
Department official at the center of the scandal, said in her opening
statement that Paul McNulty, the deputy attorney general, was not
fully candid with the committee when he discussed "allegations" that
Tim Griffin, the Karl Rove protégé and new U.S. attorney in the
Eastern District of Arkansas, was involved in "caging" when Griffin
worked for George W. Bush's 2004 reelection campaign.

Caging is an old voter suppression tactic whose roots go back to the
Reconstruction era when Southerners targeted African-Americans voters.
The modern version is associated with Republicans, which were barred
by federal court in the 1980s from using the tactic to suppress
minority voters. Modern caging involves sending registered letters to
an opponent's supporters. If the mail is returned or is not accepted,
then those sending the letter -- such as Republican partisans in 2004
-- will challenge the intended recipient's right to vote at their
polling place.

On Election Day, a Republican poll challenger will wait for the voter
to arrive and then challenge their right to vote by saying they don't
live at the address on their registration. The voter has to prove
otherwise. People are caged or kept from voting this way. The tactic,
like the rash of states that in 2006 imposed voting I.D. card
requirements, are intended to keep minority voters from casting
ballots.

Federal prosecutors like Tim Griffin are supposed to defend voting
rights, not suppress them -- which is what made Goodling's statement
so startling. But this week the Judiciary Committee was more concerned
about the firing of federal prosecutors and didn't pursue the "caging"
reference until Rep. Linda Sanchez, the committee's first Latina
member, asked Godling to "explain" it.

REP. SANCHEZ: Can you explain what caging is? I'm not familiar with
that term.

MS. GOODLING: You know, my understanding -- and I don't actually know
a lot about it -- is that it's a direct-mail term that people who do
direct mail -- when they separate addresses that may be good versus
addresses that may be bad -- that's the best information that I have,
that it just -- that it's a direct-mail term that's used by vendors in
that circumstance." ( transcript)

The Democratic congresswoman's question period soon ended, and no one
else followed up. It's hard to know what is more upsetting, the
failure of the Judiciary Committee to open a high-profile door into
GOP election fraud in 2004, or Goodling's apparently successful
attempt to whitewash caging as a "direct-mail" technique.

If only Rep. Sanchez recalled the January 2005 report issued by the
Democratic staff of the committee she sits on, "Preserving Democracy:
What Went Wrong in Ohio," which detailed numerous ways Ohio's
Democratic voters saw their votes suppressed and rejected in 2004 --
including caging. Perhaps then the Judiciary Committee -- and the
press and public -- would see that the Bush administrations ethos of
winning at all costs extends not just to picking partisan prosecutors
but doing whatever it takes to win presidential elections. (Read the
Judiciary Committee report here.)

As the 2005 Judiciary Committee report notes, Republicans in Ohio used
many tactics to discourage likely Democratic voters from voting and
having those votes count. More than 35,000 caging letters were sent
out by the GOP. Thousands of GOP poll challengers were recruited. At
the last minute, however, a federal court stuck down the Republican
caging efforts in Ohio in 2004. As the Committee report stated,
"Although the 'caging' tactics targeting 35,000 new voters by the Ohio
Republican Party were eventually struck down, it is likely they had a
negative impact on the inclination of minorities to vote."

The caging tactics were discriminatory and illegal, but they were not
unique among the tools and tactics employed by Republicans to reelect
the president. The scandal caused by the recent firing of U.S.
attorneys -- apparently because they would not pursue voter fraud
cases, according to recently discovered secret White House emails --
is but the tip of the GOP election iceberg. Summed up, the GOP's
strategy was to shift the focus to problems with individual voters --
with charges of voter fraud -- while diverting attention from the
party's systematic attempt to tilt the administration of the 2004
election. Individual voter fraud pales in comparison to systematic
election fraud.

Again, the Judiciary Committee's 2005 Democratic staff report
describes the GOP's systematic efforts to tilt Ohio's electoral
playing field. Those efforts included changing voter registration and
provisional ballot rules at the last minute, which caused thousands of
ballots to be rejected. On Election Day, the state's Democratic
strongholds saw voting machine shortages and the biggest voting
machine malfunctions. While everything that could go wrong seemed to
go wrong in Democratic districts, Ohio's GOP districts had a notable
absence of comparable problems.

The firing of federal prosecutors has revealed much about the tactics
and mindset of the president's top operatives and a compliant Justice
Department. While the White House emails show top-ranking Republicans
wanted federal prosecutors to file voter fraud cases against
Democrats, the Judiciary Committee report found much more extensive
voter fraud was perpetrated on behalf of Republicans, such as in rural
Perry County, where "there appears to be an extraordinarily high level
of 91 percent voter registration, yet a substantial number of these
voters have never voted and have no signature on file." Of these,
3,100 voters registered on Nov. 8, 1977, a year with no major
election. That is what systematic election fraud looks like.

Goodling's reference to U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin's role with "caging"
on the 2004 Bush reelection campaign might yet shine a light into the
dark practice of tilting elections that the GOP seems to have mastered
-- and not just in Ohio. But the return of the Jim Crow tactic was not
the topic that the Judiciary Committee Democrats wanted to hear about
this week. Instead, the oversight hearing overlooked one of the day's
biggest bombshells.

Steven Rosenfeld, is co-author, with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey
Wasserman, of "What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft
and Fraud in the 2004 Election"
(The New Press, 2006).

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. http://www.alternet.org/story/52383/

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