States' new laws help GOP raise voter challenges

WASHINGTON -- Ohio and Florida, which provided the decisive electoral votes for President Bush's two razor-thin national election triumphs, have enacted laws that election experts say will help Republicans impede voting by Democratic-leaning minorities in 2008.

Backers of the new laws say they're aimed at curbing vote fraud. But the statutes also could facilitate a controversial Republican tactic known as "vote caging," which the GOP tried in Ohio and Florida in 2004 before public disclosures foiled the efforts, said Joseph Rich, a former Justice Department voting rights chief in the Bush administration who's now with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.

Caging, used in the past to target poor minorities in heavily Democratic precincts, entails sending mass mailings to certain voters and then using the undelivered letters to compile lists of voters for eligibility challenges.

As the high-stakes ground war escalates heading into next year's elections, Republicans have led the charge for an array of revisions to state voting rights laws, especially in key battleground states. Republican political appointees in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division have endorsed some of these measures.

Over the past three years, the Republican-controlled state legislatures in Indiana, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have passed laws requiring every voter to produce a photo identification card -- measures that civil rights groups contend were aimed at suppressing minority voting.

The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to consider a constitutional challenge to Indiana's ID law on grounds that it unfairly affects poor and elderly voters. Gubernatorial vetoes or court rulings have nullified legislation in the other four states. A federal judge in Georgia, however, recently upheld a new photo ID law that imposes fewer obstacles to obtaining one.

Apparently he wants us to think that this "tactic" is somehow illegal or unethical, and that the Republicans alone are able to use this technique. (I would bet big money however that the Dems wouldn't find nearly the number or percentage of ineligible Republican voters.)

If this were only about getting the poor to the polls;
it would be seen as an opportunity to ingratiate with
said poor by helping them get their ID’s.
Both parties do this now by hauling people around on
election day.
Since the Dems don’t see it this way, maybe this isn’t
just about the poor?

“..sending mass mailings to certain voters and then using the undelivered letters to compile lists of voters for eligibility challenges”

Beats the heck out of sending people to physically canvas these neighborhoods. I lived for 5 years in Chicago in 3 different apartments. I was personally contacted by the democratic precinct captain after 2 of my moves (no need for the other move, same precinct.)

They know who comes and goes. I am sure that in close races some of those who have moved out of the precinct continue to vote (democratic, of course.) When I moved to Kansas they sent a card to Cook County to specifically state that I was no longer on their voter roles. For all I know I still vote in Chicago. The point is, that the only person who is more familiar with who lives at an address than the big city Democratic precinct captain would be the mailman. So challenging on the basis of "forwarding order expired" or "undeliverable as addressed" mail is a good and less expensive strategy. You don’t alert the Dem party to what you are doing by walking around their turf with a clipboard, and you don’t have to take the risk of sending some "how different I look than all of you!" middle class white canvaser who doesn't know the local hazards or ground rules into terra incognito.

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