Vote caging and disenfranchisement

Dirty political tactics deligitimize elections

By: Robyn Hyden

Posted: 10/15/08

We in the United States pride ourselves on values of freedom and democracy. Even though we pay lip service to the idea of fair elections abroad and point to voting as a symbol of our freedom, the reality is that many fellow citizens' votes are not ever counted, and in many cases are intentionally blocked by parties that are allowed to dispute the legitimacy of votes for any number of reasons.

Indications of these tactics are everywhere, and are especially prevalent in swing states, but despite widespread incidents of vote fraud, this problem has been largely ignored. Stories appear here and there. On Oct. 8, the New York Times reported that "tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law." Although the Times claimed that such efforts did not appear to be directed at one group of voters, the article noted that such efforts disproportionately affected Democrats, who have registered record numbers of voters in the past year.

In the past month, Republicans have challenged tens of thousands of voter registrations in Ohio and other swing states, claiming they were invalid. They were counter-sued by minority rights groups alleging that these tactics were illegal attempts to suppress votes. Unless county commissions reject these challenges to the voter rolls, thousands of voters could find themselves blackballed on election day.

Currently, Ohio Republicans are challenging a bipartisan measure, passed in 2006, that allows voters to cast ballots months before Election Day. The most controversial aspect of this legislation allows a window of time in which voters can register on the same day they cast their vote, and has led to a large get-out-the-vote drive for poor, minority, and homeless voters who were previously unregistered or disqualified from voting because of shady vote-caging efforts. The GOP has sued the state in response, claiming that the ease with which voters are registered leads to opportunities for vote fraud that unfairly favor Democrats.

Meanwhile, BBC reporter Greg Palast reports that in this year alone, around 1.5 million voters have already been blocked from Florida's voter roles in illegal voter screenings. He claims that these screenings are not the random mistakes of an inefficient voting system: these are conscious decisions that target minorities and poor people, directed by right-wing operatives who hope to guarantee the outcome of the election. The Florida 2000 debacle was not a fluke; rather, the same illegal activities that caused confusion on the ground there and led to a Republican victory are commonly used in battleground states during every election.

When critics talk about widespread vote fraud, they are not only referring to the kind of voter registration shenanigans that McCain supporters have taken to discussing in the past few days as evidence of a Democratic plot to steal the election - although this, too, is damaging to the election process and should not be overlooked. Critics are claiming that ACORN, the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, filed about 400 suspicious looking voter registration forms in various swing states, and that these irregularities appear to be aimed at ensuring a Democratic victory in November.

Unfortunately, many other types of election fraud have been largely ignored by the media and will most likely never be investigated. The kind of widespread voter fraud that gets very little attention consists of much more insidious campaigns throughout the U.S., including efforts to purge voter rolls, electronic voter fraud that erases thousands of votes logged on electronic voting machines, and blatant attempts to intimidate voters and discourage them from voting. These tactics, unfortunately, seem to be primarily directed by right-wing organizations, sometimes directed by RNC officials themselves, and have cost Democrats hundreds of thousands of votes during the past two presidential elections. In the 2000 elections, projections estimated that up to a million votes had been unfairly blocked. Yet despite outraged calls for reform and investigation following these allegations, very little has changed in terms of the laws and the ability to prosecute and investigate vote fraud in the past eight years.

Proof of any large-scale vote blocking conspiracy is hard to come by. There is plenty of evidence out there for reporters who wish to sort through thousands of pages of documents and contact voters on the list one by one. But many reporters are unwilling to go to the trouble, and Congress generally neglects to investigate, probably for the same reason - as they did, for example, in 2006 when Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush blocked around 97,000 voters from Florida's approved voter rolls, but never got around to charging a single one of those people with vote fraud. Such incidents are widespread but somehow never properly investigated or addressed by Congress.

Vote caging is one of the most successful voter suppression strategies and has been used to block millions of voters from voting since the tactic was first pioneered in 1964. In this strategy, registered voters are first sent letter via registered mail with a "DO NOT FORWARD" directive on the envelope. If they do not respond to the letter by signing the address verification inside, or if the letter is returned to the sender, their names are challenged by the political party heading up the strategy, and as a result the voters are usually stricken from voting registries or are only allowed to cast "provisional ballots," which are usually never counted. This strategy unjustly targets certain voters more than others: voters who live elsewhere for part of the year - for examples, letters are mailed during the summer, while snowbirds in Florida, who tend to return north during summer months, are not at home; college students, who also live in multiple residences throughout the year, are away on summer vacations. These letters also do not reach servicemen who are deployed overseas; voters who have been evicted or had their homes repossessed recently; and voters who are homeless or transient. The common thread among all of these groups is their tendency to vote Democrat, especially during this election, when college students, servicemen and women, and those affected by the economic downturn are much more likely to support Obama. As a result, this tactic has been used to greater effect by Republicans.

While vote caging is illegal, as are many other vote fraud tactics, it is almost impossible to prosecute these crimes. Even if those responsible are ultimately held accountable, it is often long after the election is over and results are irreversible.

Vote caging was first conceived as a political strategy during Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential bid. In both 1982 and 1986, the GOP was pressured into signing contracts that they would abandon the strategy, which was acknowledged to be blatantly racist and classist, targeted predominately at unstable, low-income households. This did not stop Republicans from using these strategies again in Ohio and Florida during both the 2000 and 2004 elections - and now, during the 2008 election as well.

Vote caging has already made several appearances during this election season. In late December, Kansas GOP chairman Kris Kobach sent an email out to supporters bragging, "To date, the Kansas GOP has identified and caged more voters in the last 11 months than the previous two years!" Amazingly, he remains in office. Florida has a new "no match, no vote" law; if voters' names do not exactly match those on a federal database, the voters are automatically stricken from the rolls. This means that anyone who has spelling discrepancies because of transcription errors in their name or who has shortened their name to a nickname such as Sam or Bob, will be deemed unfit to vote. Unfortunately, voters who have been removed will not find out about this fluke until it is too late to re-register to vote, and as a result will have no choice but to cast a "provisional ballot" two days after Election Day, after they have proved their identity.

One investigation found that a GOP list of vote caging targets before the 2004 election contained strictly the names of black soldiers who were serving in Iraq; these soldiers came home to find that their voter registration had been disputed and their votes would not be counted. Even if such soldiers sent their absentee ballots overseas, they were often intercepted and disputed by the RNC (along with thousands of other military ballots from overseas), which meant they were never counted. One must ask: if the RNC is so intent on "supporting our troops," is it necessary for them to block their votes? Is this really about suspected "voter id fraud," as they claim, or is it an attempt to block a segment of the population that is more and more likely to vote Democrat?

Republicans have complained often in the past about voter identification fraud, suggesting that the use of dead people's names or fake names is a widespread practice and that voter identification laws are necessary to insure fair elections. These claims are used to pass more stringent voter registration laws which often end up disenfranchising large numbers of people, skewing the votes more than any perceived voter identification fraud ever could. For example, the proposal to require photo identification for voters disproportionately affects big city dwellers, the elderly, the handicapped and the poor - groups that are statistically more likely to vote Democrat and less likely to have driver's licenses than the rest of the population. Georgia just passed such a measure. Instead of insuring fair elections, these laws disenfranchise large blocs of the population by placing further obstacles in the way of voting. Many eager voters have been turned away from the polls on Election Day because they were not aware of requirements for photo IDs, and in some reports, voters were asked to provide such identification when it was not a legal requirement.

Other small-scale but disturbing attempts to confuse and block voters targets members of inner-city communities, with flyers and volunteers spreading rumors that any person with a criminal record of any kind would not be allowed to vote, and would even be arrested if they attempted to show up at the polls. On numerous occasions, the RNC has commissioned off-duty policemen to patrol the polls, an effort that is appparently meant to intimidate voters who are unclear about their legal right to vote.

Additionally, problems with illegitimate vote tallies from easily-hacked electronic voting machines continue to plague elections in states that have switched over from paper ballots, although these incidents are much more widely reported. Concerns about electronic vote fraud have spurred many districts to stick to paper ballots. Unfortunately, there is just as much room for tampering with paper ballots, especially when votes are entered into computers for tallying and paper ballots are misplaced, again opening up a greater possibility of vote fraud without a paper trail.

The efforts by elected party officials to suppress and confuse voting rights is an outrage to every member of our society, and should be addressed. Along with all of the other problems with our "democratic" system of government, the irregularities in recent elections leave even the most conscientious of voters to ask, why even bother to vote? Has the outcome of the election already been decided? And how can we ever believe in the outcome of our elections if the process seems to be so illegitimate?