{"id":11237,"date":"2007-06-25T10:30:02","date_gmt":"2007-06-25T14:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/11237.html"},"modified":"2007-06-25T10:30:02","modified_gmt":"2007-06-25T14:30:02","slug":"more-from-the-cage-match","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/more-from-the-cage-match\/","title":{"rendered":"More from the ‘cage’ match"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, we talked about<\/a> former U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin and his role in a 2004 “vote-caging” scheme in Florida. To briefly review, “caging” is an illegal voter-suppression scheme<\/a> created by Republicans to disenfranchise likely Democrats. It’s a straight-forward trick: the GOP sends hundreds of thousands of letters marked “Do not forward” to targeted voters’ homes. Returned letters are used as proof to challenge voter registration.<\/p>\n

This is particularly easy for the GOP when targeting soldiers who can’t check their mailboxes — because they’re in Iraq fighting a war. This matters in the context of the U.S. Attorney scandal because Rove protege Griffin, research director for the RNC in 2004, was involved in the caging scheme in Florida.<\/p>\n

Of course, the scheme was used in other key battleground states<\/a> as well.<\/p>\n

Four days before the 2004 election, the Justice Department’s civil rights chief sent an unusual letter to a federal judge in Ohio who was weighing whether to let Republicans challenge the credentials of 23,000 mostly African-American voters.<\/p>\n

The case was triggered by allegations that Republicans had sent a mass mailing to mostly Democratic-leaning minorities and used undeliverable letters to compile a list of voters potentially vulnerable to eligibility challenges.<\/p>\n

In his letter to U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott of Cincinnati, Assistant Attorney General Alex Acosta argued that it would “undermine” the enforcement of state and federal election laws if citizens could not challenge voters’ credentials.<\/p>\n

Former Justice Department civil rights officials and election watchdog groups charge that his letter sided with Republicans engaging in an illegal, racially motivated tactic known as “vote-caging” in a state that would be pivotal in delivering President Bush a second term in the White House.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Got that? Republicans in Ohio wanted to use caging to disenfranchise thousands of African-American voters — many of them serving in the military — and Bush’s Justice Department intervened to give the GOP a hand. “The Justice Department was not a party to either case. Nor did Judge Dlott solicit the federal government’s views. But Acosta weighed in anyway.”<\/p>\n

Better yet, shortly after intervening, then-Assistant Attorney General Acosta was promoted to, of course, U.S. Attorney (in Miami).
\n
\nSome of Acosta’s former colleagues are speaking out about his partisan agenda.<\/p>\n

…Robert Kengle, former deputy chief of the department’s Voting Rights Section who served under Acosta, said the letter amounted to “cheerleading for the Republican defendants.”<\/p>\n

“It was doubly outrageous,” he said, “because the allegation in the litigation was that these were overwhelmingly African-American voters that were on the challenge list.”<\/p>\n

Joseph Rich, a former chief of the department’s Voting Rights Section, called the Ohio scheme “vote caging.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Given what we know about Hans von Spakovsky’s work politicizing the Justice Department’s Civil Right Division, might he have had a role in Acosta’s support for vote-caging? Asked about this over the weekend, Acosta declined comment<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Last week, four Democratic U.S. senators — Kennedy, Whitehouse, Lincoln, and Pryor — called<\/a> for a Justice Department investigation into the GOP’s caging efforts. Hearings also seem likely. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, we talked about former U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin and his role in a 2004 “vote-caging” scheme in Florida. To briefly review, “caging” is an illegal voter-suppression scheme created by Republicans to disenfranchise likely Democrats. It’s a straight-forward trick: the GOP sends hundreds of thousands of letters marked “Do not forward” to targeted voters’ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}