Voter Caging: Voter Suppression Republican Style

According to a long report by ProjectVote, challenging voter eligibility grew out of Jim Crow era laws. Like poll taxes, voter challenges prevented African Americans voting. Some of the regulations for challenging a voter’s eligibility are ridiculously simple. In Florida, a challenger need only have a “good faith belief” to issue a challenge; he doesn’t even have to have personal knowledge of a voter’s eligibility. The penalty of a bad faith challenge? First-degree misdemeanor.

This is one story the mainstream media hasn’t touched.

Recent Congressional inquiries into the firings of United States Attorneys for purportedly partisan reasons have sparked interest in the esoteric term “caging.” The term drew attention after former Justice Department White House liaison Monica Goodling raised it in her May 2007 testimony to the House Judiciary Committee that is investigating the firings. Ms. Goodling testified that Tim Griffin, former interim US Attorney for Arkansas, had not been forthcoming to the committee about his involvement in “voter caging” operations when he worked for the Republican National Committee (RNC). The committee members were unfamiliar with the term and did not pursue the matter beyond asking for a definition.

Ms. Goodling responded that caging is a direct mail term, and she was correct as far as she went. The term “caging” refers to a direct mail industry practice of sending out mass mailings and culling the responses according to categories that are useful to the sender, such as positive responses, no responses, or returned mail. What the committee did not ask Ms.Goodling, and what she did not volunteer, was that caging is an important first step in challenging the eligibility of voters during a political campaign. It is a component of many Republican self-described anti-fraud campaigns that historically target heavily minority and Democratic voting populations.

Caging in this context involves sending out non-forwardable or registered mail to targeted groups of voters and compiling “caging lists” of voters whose mail was returned for any reason. Although the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA ) prohibits election officials from canceling the registration of voters merely because a single piece of mail has been returned, Republican operatives have used the lists for many years in caging operations to challenge the voting rights of thousands of minority and urban voters nationwide on the basis of returned mail alone.

With their caging lists in hand, Republican officials and operatives take the second step in their caging operations, using the lists as the basis for media campaigns to create the impression that the returned mail is evidence of mass voter fraud. Having raised the chimera of a voter fraud, Republican parties and operatives move into the third phase of caging operations. Operatives use the caging lists to challenge the voting eligibility of thousands of people of color and Democrats. The caging process, couched in racially neutral terms, is described in one party campaign document under the heading, “Pre-Election Day Operations – New Registration Mailing.”‘ The use of such lists by the Republican Party to challenge voters in heavily Republican precincts has not been reported.

The Democratic Party, election experts, and civic organizations, charge that the intended effect of voter caging operations is to suppress minority votes. Several court decisions and occasional public comments by Republican officials lend support to this conclusion. In response, national and state Republican party entities defend caging operations as necessary ballot security measures. At least one federal court disagrees. The RNC is bound by a U.S. District Court consent decree ordering it to obtain court approval before it engages in any type of ballot security program. Yet,

Republican-led caging operations continue unabated.

Caging operations are relevant to the US Attorney dismissals because at least three of the fired US Attorneys refused to pursue voter fraud charges that could be used by Republicans to paint Democrats as perpetrators of fraud despite being pressured to do so by Republican Congress members and officials immediately before the 2006 elections. The US Attorneys are John McKay, Western District of Washington, David Iglesias, California, and Todd Graves of the Western District of Missouri. Mr. Graves’ interim successor, Bradley Schlozman, brought voter fraud charges against four former employees of a community organization in the week before the 2006 election. All three fired US Attorneys had exemplary records of service in office. The common thread in their performance was that they did not respond to external pressure to prosecute weak voter fraud cases.

As Republican caging operations often use state voter challenge laws to prevent targeted electors from casting their ballots, the discussion will begin with a brief overview of the history of state voter challenge laws and their roots in the post-Reconstruction era during which laws and procedures were adopted to demobilize and limit political participation by newly freed African Americans. The report will outline statements by Republican officials in which they admit that caging operations suppress the “Black vote.” We will then survey two caging operations conducted by the RNC and state Republican parties. We divide our survey into periods, the years before 2004 and the years 2004 and after. This section will address other means of compiling caging lists in addition to returned mail, such as using existing state databases and private software to compile the lists.

Litigation arising from voter caging and challenges will be discussed during the survey of state challenge campaigns and in a detailed litigation section that follows. The Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties fought against illegal caging and challenge campaigns by the GOP in state and federal courts. Two of the most important cases stemmed from GOP caging efforts in New Jersey during the 1980’s and led to consent decrees that are still in effect. Under the consent decrees, the RNC has agreed to restrictions to bring its activities into compliance with the Constitution and federal law. As the RNC has pointed out in subsequent lawsuits, only the RNC is bound by the decrees, not the state Republican parties.