The Republican Party has finally found the outer edge of political cynicism; it's located in Macomb County, Mich. Operatives there have figured out an upside to the foreclosure crisis roiling black neighborhoods: It enables mass voter-registration challenges and thereby offers a powerful opportunity to suppress the vote in Democrat-leaning districts.
An enterprising journalist for the independent-media site Michigan Messenger exposed the party's plan to exploit foreclosures last week, prompting local leaders to feign outrage, claim to have been misquoted and threaten a libel suit. Those denials notwithstanding, the Obama campaign has asked a federal court to issue an injunction against any use of foreclosure filings in registration challenges, just in case. As general counsel Bob Bauer put it, "They can tell it to the judge."
But while the details of the Michigan plot may be uniquely noxious, the broader tactic—known as voter "caging"—is a 50-year-old Republican dirty trick that is rooted in century-old voting laws designed to skirt the 15th Amendment. A series of legal challenges had finally driven voter caging into remission by the 1990s. But in 2004, desperate Republican operatives facing a huge Democratic turnout revived it with great success. And they're redeploying it widely in 2008.
The scam is as convoluted as it is craven. It starts with a list of potentially ineligible voters. The Macomb County gang planned to create its list from recent foreclosure filings, according to the Messenger, based on the notion that people who have lost their homes are likely to be registered under incorrect addresses. The more traditional route is to simply flood largely non-white districts with mailers marked "do not forward," then compile the names that are returned undeliverable.
Most states maintain stunningly broad rules governing registration challenges, so this sort of flimsy evidence is enough to make sweeping claims of voter fraud. Armed with their lists, Republican operatives file mass challenges to thousands of registrations, charging that the listed residents are cheating the system by polling in the wrong precinct. At the polls, they then challenge individual voters, which often means those voters only get a provisional ballot.
The challenge itself isn't the point, however. A 2007 Project Vote study outlines voter caging’s history and notes that most mass registration challenges are filed just under the deadline and are rarely pursued meaningfully. Rather, the goal is to gum up the democratic process by creating chaos, both at the point of registration and on Election Day.
By holding a breathless press conference trumpeting widespread voter fraud, Republicans busy election boards with responding to nonsense rather than serving voters and, worse, justify sending ranks of operatives to polling stations to harass voters in the name of "monitoring." Each Election Day challenge occupies a poll worker, creating long lines and disorder that discourages all would-be voters. And if they're lucky, they scare new voters away from showing up at all.
The tactic has been so wildly successful that Republicans have solidified the myth of voter fraud in both the popular mind and the law. This spring, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an Indiana law that requires voters to show a state-issued ID at the poll. The court ruled that the specter of voter fraud justified the imposition on democracy. It ignored research showing voter fraud to be extraordinarily rare and dismissed evidence that blacks, youth and low-income people are all far less likely to have state IDs.
Republican operatives set the stage for that ruling in 2004. They challenged half a million voters in targeted campaigns across nine politically strategic states, according to Project Vote. Prior to the election, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio all made voter challenges even easier than they had already been; all three states had Republican-controlled legislatures. In Ohio's Cuyahoga County—which includes Cleveland and is reliably Democrat—Republicans flooded polling stations with operatives to challenge 14,000 voters; 45 percent of them lived in majority black communities. They hit 31,000 voters statewide.
And as registration deadlines approach this fall, the same process is gearing up all over the country.
In Wisconsin, Republican Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen filed suit last week—a month before the registration deadline—demanding election officials check individual records of thousands of voters who registered before the state's new voter ID system went into effect. In Madison, City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl complained that the last-minute demand will make other necessary preparations for the largest-expected voter turnout impossible. "It will disenfranchise voters," she told Wisconsin's Capital Times.
In Louisiana, the secretary of state is busy purging thousands of "inactive" voters from the rolls. According to the Louisiana Justice Institute, the only way you'd know you're on the inactive list is if you saw the state's ad in a newspaper, which thousands of still-displaced Orleans Parish residents couldn't do. The Justice Institute has published a searchable database of the names here, to help displaced residents who want to vote in their hometown make sure they stay registered.
Meanwhile, at least one Virginia county has targeted college students with plain scare tactics. In Montgomery County, home to Virginia Tech, the registrar warned Virginia Tech students that listing their campus address for voter registration could jeopardize everything from their parents' tax returns to their own driver's licenses. "If you have a scholarship attached to your former residence, you could lose this funding," the ominous but vague memo declared, according to Inside Higher Ed.
And Michigan's not the only place where losing your home could mean also losing your vote. The Columbus Dispatch reported this summer on state election officials' concerns that Ohio's new voter ID law will collide with foreclosures to create chaos at the polls. Voters who are registered at their old homes but have new addresses on their IDs, for instance, will be turned away. Ditto in several other states with both new voter ID laws and waves of foreclosure.
None of this is new. Republicans first used the myth of voter fraud to justify vote-suppression tactics in an Arkansas race in 1958, deliberately exploiting Reconstruction-era laws that made voter challenges easy enough to keep newly franchised blacks out of the process. It worked so well in '58 that in 1964 they launched "Operation Eagle Eye," which targeted 1.8 million voters nationally.
The game proceeded with impunity until 1981, when the Democrats sued over a voter-caging campaign in New Jersey, arguing that the effort deliberately disenfranchised minority voters. That case, along with a subsequent one in 1986, generated a consent order that barred the national party from launching mass voter challenges without getting court approval. The order, however, does not bind state party officials.
Nor can we count on the network of federal law enforcement that mobilized to block just this sort of chicanery in the Jim Crow days. The Bush administration's politicized firings of U.S. attorneys were, in no small part, driven by its effort to stymie the protection of voter rights Three of the eight U.S. attorney firings being investigated by Congress involved officials who refused to go after supposed voter-fraud cases in the run-up to the 2006 congressional elections.
Which leaves it to us to protect ourselves from this cynical but deeply effective manufactured chaos. A growing number of watchdog groups are trying to mobilize citizens to do the Justice Department's job. This week, a coalition under the banner Election Protection launched a Web site and a hotline (1-866-OUR-VOTE) where voters can learn how to make sure their own registration is secure and report problems in their districts. The Advancement Project has set up a similar site here.
Jurisdictions facing registration irregularities, backlogs and confusion now will certainly face the same on Nov. 4. Neither situation will be accidental, and the best tool left for identifying them in advance is through would-be voters. An ounce of prevention, watchdogs stress, is worth a pound of post-election litigation and outrage.
Kai Wright is a regular contributor to The Root.