What the heck is vote caging, and why should we care?

[EV_Ares]

Raging Caging - By Dahlia Lithwick @ Slate

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.

((((rest of article @ link below)))

http://www.slate.com/id/2167284?nav=tap3

[fasttense]

1. Well caging lists are used in direct mail

but when repukes use them it is to prevent liberal leaning people from voting.

[Warpy]

6. It's to prevent poor, working class, and especially black

people from voting, because those are the areas of town those caging lists target.

It's not going to work, of course, even if they manage to escape prison, because the ritzy suburbs aren't doing that well, either. Money is tight and business is down, and some suburbanites are seeing themselves join the rest of us in being house poor and cash strapped to the point of needing to dress out of WalMart and hoping nobody else notices.

The more they chirp about the great economy on the evening news, the more suburbanites the party loses.

[AndyTiedye]

8. Walmart? Never!

needing to dress out of WalMart and hoping nobody else notices.

I'd rather dress out of Goodwill.

[Warpy]

9. Me too

I dressed out of thrift shops, I furnished my house out of thrift shops, and I'd have eaten out of them, too, had they had a food section.

Now that I inherited wisely, I contribute to them rather than shop in them. I figure people who are still as poor as I was need them more. I can't resist looking, though, whenever I drop of a big load of odds and ends.

[lligrd]

2. Are You Kidding Me?

I can't believe our Representatives don't know how Karl stole the elections. Haven't they been paying any attention? Apparently not.

[in_cog_ni_to]

3. I love Slate's explanation:

<snip>
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 Orleans—Sordid 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 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.

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. <snip>

[PDJane]

7. I, like Palast,

wonder how many people in the US try to vote, but can't? Would your pathetic vote numbers expand exponentially, throwing the worst of the worst out of office?

[EFerrari]

4. K&R.

[Flatulo]

5. Scumbags.