Last week, the Senate Rules Committee held a hearing on the voter suppression tactic known as “caging.” Its first witness was Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a former U.S. attorney who has introduced a bill explicitly outlawing the procedure.
Whitehouse’s testimony clearly explained the tactic, which gained prominence during the U.S. attorney scandal. Karl Rove pushed heavily for the ouster of the U.S. attorney in Arkansas in order to install his protege, Tim Griffin. During his time as research director for the Republican National Committee in 2004, Griffin allegedly engaged in the caging of African-American servicemembers.
As Whitehouse notes, caging is a three-step process that targets voters of the opposite party, who are often minorities. The campaign sends “do not forward/return to sender” letters to those individuals, and then challenges the votes of those whom do not respond — even if they are servicemembers stationed abroad, as happened in 2004. From his remarks:
Indeed, vote caging was used as early as 1960 in Arizona and continued, in fits and starts, through the 2004 elections — when evidence surfaced that voter caging lists were being compiled. While not every voter caging effort is successful in disenfranchising large numbers of voters, the failure of a voter suppression effort is no excuse for its legality.
Whitehouse’s bill — the Caging Prohibition Act (S. 2305) — would “require any private party who challenges the right of another citizen to vote (or register to vote) to set forth in writing, under penalty of perjury, the specific grounds for the alleged ineligibility.” Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) has introduced a similar bill in the House.
Hopefully journalists such as the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Jonathan Weisman were listening to Whitehouse’s testimony, since they have both admitted that they have no idea what this “caging thing” is.
Transcript:
In recent years, we have witnessed the re-emergence of an especially nefarious voter suppression tactic, which has come to be known as “vote caging.” As Professor Davidson, who will testify later this morning, has noted, caging is a three-step process.
First, a campaign identifies a geographic area with a disproportionate number of registered voters who belong to the opposite party — sometimes, but not always, taking the ethnic or racial makeup of that area into account. Second, the campaign sends “do not forward/return to sender” letters to voters in that area.
Third, the campaign challenges the right to vote of those citizens whose mail was returned “undelivered” — on the grounds that the voter does not live at the registered address. Of course, there are many reasons why a piece of mail might be “returned to sender” that have nothing whatsoever to do with a voter’s eligibility.
For example, a voter might be an active member of the armed forces and stationed far from home, or a student who is lawfully registered at his parents’ address. Even a typographical error during entry of the voter’s registration information might result in a “false negative.” Nevertheless, these individuals end up facing a challenge at the polls, and possibly losing their right to vote. It is especially galling that those who engage in vote caging often portray it as an anti-fraud measure, when it is really just the opposite: a nefarious way to compile obviously unreliable lists that will be used to challenge legitimate voters.
Caging came into the media spotlight this summer, during Congress’ investigation into the politicization of the Department of Justice and the dismissal of United States Attorneys, but the practice is neither new nor rare. Indeed, vote caging was used as early as 1960 in Arizona and continued, in fits and starts, through the 2004 elections — when evidence surfaced that voter caging lists were being compiled. While not every voter caging effort is successful in disenfranchising large numbers of voters, the failure of a voter suppression effort is no excuse for its legality. Indeed, Minnesota, California, and my home state of Rhode Island have enacted state laws prohibiting vote caging.
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