- Palast, who first reported this story
for BBC Television Newsnight (UK) and Democracy Now! (USA), is author
of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse.
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- The Republican National Committee has
a special offer for African-American soldiers: Go to Baghdad, lose
your vote.
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- A confidential campaign directed by GOP
party chiefs in October 2004 sought to challenge the ballots of tens of
thousands of voters in the last presidential election, virtually all of
them cast by residents of Black-majority precincts. Files from the secret
vote-blocking campaign were obtained by BBC Television Newsnight, London.
They were attached to emails accidentally sent by Republican operatives
to a non-party website.
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- One group of voters wrongly identified
by the Republicans as registering to vote from false addresses: servicemen
and women sent overseas.
-
- Here's how the scheme worked: The
RNC mailed these voters letters in envelopes marked, "Do not forward",
to be returned to the sender. These letters were mailed to servicemen
and women, some stationed overseas, to their US home addresses.
The letters then returned to the Bush-Cheney campaign as "undeliverable."
-
- The lists of soldiers of "undeliverable"
letters were transmitted from state headquarters, in this case Florida,
to the RNC in Washington. The party could then challenge the voters' registration
and thereby prevent their absentee ballot being counted.
-
- One target list was comprised exclusively
of voters registered at the Jacksonville, Florida, Naval Air Station.
Jacksonville is third largest naval installation in the US, best known
as home of the Blue Angels fighting squandron.
-
- [See this scrub sheet at http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=160156893&context=set
-72157594155273706&size=o ]
-
- Our team contacted the homes of several
on the caging list, such as Randall Prausa, a serviceman, whose wife said
he had been ordered overseas.
-
- A soldier returning home in time to vote
in November 2004 could also be challenged on the basis of the returned
envelope. Soldiers challenged would be required to vote by "provisional"
ballot.
-
- Over one million provisional ballots
cast in the 2004 race were never counted; over half a million absentee
ballots were also rejected. The extraordinary rise in the number
of rejected ballots was the result of the widespread multi-state voter
challenge campaign by the Republican Party. The operation, of which
the purge of Black soldiers was a small part, was the first mass challenge
to voting America had seen in two decades.
-
- The BBC obtained several dozen confidential
emails sent by the Republican's national Research Director
and Deputy Communications chief, Tim Griffin to GOP Florida campaign chairman
Brett Doster and other party leaders. Attached were spreadsheets
marked, "Caging.xls." Each of these contained several
hundred to a few thousand voters and their addresses.
-
- A check of the demographics of the addresses
on the "caging lists," as the GOP leaders called them indicated
that most were in African-American majority zip codes.
-
- Ion Sanco, the non-partisan elections
supervisor of Leon County (Tallahassee) when shown the lists by this reporter
said: "The only thing I can think of - African American
voters listed like this these might be individuals that will be
challenged if they attempted to vote on Election Day."
-
- These GOP caging lists were obtained
by the same BBC team that first exposed the wrongful purge of African-American
"felon" voters in 2000 by then-Secretary of State Katherine
Harris. Eliminating the voting rights of those voters -- 94,000 were
targeted -- likely caused Al Gore's defeat in that race.
-
-
- The Republican National Committee in
Washington refused our several requests to respond to the BBC discovery.
However, in Tallahassee, the Florida Bush campaign's spokespeople offered
several explanations for the list.
-
- Joseph Agostini, speaking for the GOP,
suggested the lists were of potential donors to the Bush campaign. Oddly,
the supposed donor list included residents of the Sulzbacher Center
a shelter for homeless families.
-
- Another spokesperson for the Bush campaign,
Mindy Tucker Fletcher, ultimately changed the official response, acknowledging
that these were voters, "we mailed to, where the letter came back
bad addresses."
-
- The party has refused to say why it would
mark soldiers as having "bad addresses" subject to challenge
when they had been assigned abroad.
-
- The apparent challenge campaign was not
inexpensive. The GOP mailed the letters first class, at a total
cost likely exceeding millions of dollars, so that the addresses would
be returned to "cage" workers.
-
- "This is not a challenge list,"
insisted the Republican spokesmistress. However, she modified that assertion
by adding, "That's not what it's set up to be."
- Setting up such a challenge list would
be a crime under federal law. The Voting Rights Act of 1965
outlaws mass challenges of voters where race is a factor in choosing the
targeted group.
-
- While the party insisted the lists were
not created for the purpose to challenge Black voters, the GOP ultimately
offered no other explanation for the mailings. However, Tucker Fletcher
asserted Republicans could still employ the list to deny ballots to those
they considered suspect voters. When asked if Republicans would
use the list to block voters, Tucker Fletcher replied, "Where it's
stated in the law, yeah."
-
- It is not possible at this time to determine
how many on the potential blacklist were ultimately challenged and lost
their vote. Soldiers sending in their ballot from abroad would not
know their vote was lost because of a challenge.
-
- _______
-
-
- For the full story of caging lists and
voter purges of 2004, plus the documents, read Greg Palast's New York
Times bestseller, ARMED MADHOUSE: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, Armed
Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks,
the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from
the Front Lines of the Class War.
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