It's Late October-- So It's A Time For Goblins, Goons And Griffins... I Mean Caging

No, caging isn't what Alaska extremist Joe Miller does to journalists who ask him tough questions. That's handcuffing. Caging is one of the things-- there are many-- that elites do to hold down voter participation in elections, because, of course, there are lots of regular folks and only a few multimillionaires and if we vote, they're more likely to lose. One of the books I never tire of sharing is Thom Hartmann's Threshold and, yes, he has a great explanation of caging.

[T]he Republican Party has devised dozens of ways to prevent people from voting, particularly in largely Democratic regions. They engage in "caging"-- a practice the Republican Party has been under court order to stop for more than two decades but regularly ignores-- where they mail letters to people's homes and if enclosed cards aren't returned or if the original envelope is returned, they can challenge the voter at the polls, forcing them to vote on a "provisional ballot," which is usually not counted. They have passed laws in more than a half-dozen states (the most infamous in Indiana, which was the subject of a Supreme Court case that upheld this Republican practice) that say that a voter's registration must exactly match his driver's license or Social Security records. Thus, because I'm registered to vote as Thomas C. Hartmann but my driver's license says "Thomas Carl Hartmann," a Republican poll challenger in Indiana could, if he thought I looked like a Democrat (a criterion that's often skin-color or age related) or lived in a heavily Democratic area, prevent me from voting on a real ballot and force me to a provisional ballot.

The British Broadcasting Corporation documented in a TV news special in October 2008 how more than three million Americans had shown up at the polls in the 2004 elections thinking they were registered to vote, only to be turned away or forced to use a provisional ballot. Because of aggressive Republican efforts in the following four years, estimates of disenfranchised voters in the 2008 election run from seven million to ten million. In Colorado, for example, the BBC reported that in 2008, even after a massive voters registration drive by the Democratic Party, fewer people were registered to vote than in 2004 because of the voter-purging efforts of two successive Republican secretaries of state.

Rove's point person on voter caging during the Bush Regime was a sleazy Arkansas lawyer named Tim Griffin, who Rove had placed in a U.S. Attorney job in Little Rock, where he further disgraced himself and was forced to resign. Needless to say, he's among the flotsam and jetsam the teabagger faux-- though well financed-- movement has puked up this year. He's running for an open House seat in Little Rock (AR-2)-- and he's running against Blue America backed Joyce Elliott. Yesterday Brad Friedman looked at how the voter caging scandal had largely escaped media scrutiny-- until now.

it's nice to see a bit of in-depth coverage of issues that actually matter from local news reporters for a change. Here's Melissa Sims of KARK 4 News in Arkansas last night, on the vote caging of Tim Griffin, the Karl Rove protege installed as U.S. Attorney without Senate confirmation by the Bush Administration during their infamous U.S. Attorney purge.

Griffin's vote-caging dirty work for the Bush Regime in 2004 was originally reported on by Greg Palast working on the BBC special referenced by Hartmann above. There's little doubt that Griffin should have been prosecuted and punished for his criminal behavior. Yesterday Palast was writing about Griffith again.

"What he [Griffin] did was absolutely illegal and he should be in jail."

That's hardly the kind of endorsement a candidate for Congress expects. But that is the conclusion of voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after digging into the evidence of Congressional candidate Tim Griffin's role in directing the Republican National Committee's (RNC) racially biased attack on voters known as "caging."

A brutal mano-a-mano race in Arkansas' Second District has become a showdown between Sarah Palin's banner carrier Griffin (funded by SarahPAC) and Democrat Joyce Elliott, who has drawn homeboy Bill Clinton back to Little Rock.
The ex-president, in Arkansas this week, was especially worked up about Griffin's caging list, vote suppression scheme. (Our Good Ol' Boy in Chief told me back in 2008 he would bust out the story, and it only took him two years to do the right thing, a personal best for Bill.)

Here's how caging à la Griffin works: In 2004, Griffin and the Bush re-election committee sent letters to Democratic voters marked "do not forward." Griffin seemed especially interested in sending notes to active duty soldiers sent overseas, especially soldiers of color. When the letters to the servicemen were returned to the RNC as "undeliverable," the Bush crew would then challenge the soldiers' absentee ballots as fraudulent. In other words: Go to Iraq, lose your vote. Mission accomplished.

This past Monday, the local NBC TV affiliate's news anchor, Melissa Simas, confronted Griffin on air about his using caging to challenge the votes of black soldiers on active duty overseas. Griffin, pathetically, tried to paint his "Tim Crow" operation as patriotic.

In June 2007, our BBC "Newsnight" team disclosed that US federal prosecutor David Iglesias was fired because, he told us, the Griffin/Rove/Bush crew wanted him to arrest innocent people for voting fraud. He refused and he was fired. Seven other prosecutors, most of them Republicans, were also dismissed for failure to pursue a phony "voter fraud" investigations which would justify the RNC's caging operation.

One of these resistant prosecutors who chose integrity over politics, Bud Cummins of Little Rock, was replaced with Griffin himself.

The day after BBC broadcast our exposé, Griffin resigned as US prosecutor, literally in tears, blaming "that British reporter" for his downfall. Mr. Griffin, I'm not British, I'm as American as apple pie and post-imperial warfare.

The race in Little Rock has come down to a slugfest between a 30 year veteran teacher of public schools and one of the sleaziest lowlifes to ever emerge from the bowels of Rove's dirty tricks menagerie. Character is an issue-- and if it turns into the dominant issue, Griffin is going to lose this race despite prevailing trends. In a debate Monday Griffin actually tried blaming his colleagues from the Bush Regime for his bad reputation. "The Bush administration mishandled that entire episode,” Griffin said. “It doesn’t take away from the fact that I was proud to be asked and proud to serve" and at the debate he told the audience that his consideration for his wife, then pregnant, lead to his resignation, as well as his belief that he would not receive a fair trial.