by Greg Palast
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Republicans too fielded a team in the Jim Crow “literacy test” game. But as the South was conceded to the Democrats, the GOP did its racial thing in the West: From 1958 to 1962, the Republicans used “Operation Eagle Eye” to menace Hispanic voters in Arizona to keep the wrong color folk from voting. A Republican lawyer would question every dark-skinned voter about their address and history, then read them a passage from the Constitution, challenging their right to vote if they did not provide a clear English interpretation of the passage.
“Literacy tests,” “Operation Eagle Eye,” all that was made illegal by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Nevertheless, in 1981, the Republican Party toyed with mass challenges of voters. They created a caging list of 45,000 folk in Black precincts of New Jersey—and swiftly got busted. Facing prosecution, the party signed a consent decree swearing in federal court never again to play the racial profile game anywhere in the nation, so help them God.
But now, in October 2004, this political party on legal probation appeared to slide back into its old ways.
The Tallahassee Lassie and the Bleaching of the Voter Rolls
If we were going to show the Republican’s Black-voter caging lists on BBC Television we’d better make sure that we were not planted with false material. Were the documents bogus? The corpse of Dan Rather’s career was still swinging from the Bush campaign’s front gates after he used a questionable document in a basically solid story on the President’s Vietnam war days.
So we went to the horse’s mouth. Two weeks before the elections, our BBC crew flew to Washington to ask about the lists, but the Republican National Committee slammed the door on us. Back in Florida, we thought we’d ask Brett Doster, supreme commander of the Bush campaign in that state, straight up, “Brett, did you lose something? Is this your list? Do you and the RNC intend to block a few hundred thousand Black folk from voting on November 2?”
In Tallahassee, the path to Doster’s door was blocked by a thick-armed blonde slurping on a supersize Coca-Cola: Mindy Tucker Fletcher, chief spokesmistress for the Bush campaign in Florida.
Brett, she said, couldn’t speak for himself; he’d canceled our appointment. She would do the talking on his behalf. She smiled at me. It was not a ray of sunshine. Mindy Tucker Fletcher is one of those public relations flacks with that condescending faux-friendly manner who is always so glad to meet you but would prefer for you to die in pain.
After a little Q&A dance, I finally asked her if the Republican Party kept something called a “caging list” of voters.
Mindy: “I don’t know what a ‘caging list’ is. I don’t—I’m not part of that strategy.”
That strategy? Hmm. I showed her the list. I can’t say she started snorting cola out of her nose, but clearly, she was flustered.
She took the list inside the brick citadel, the George Herbert Walker Bush Republican Center, while I maintained a low-speed chase with her assistant, lobbing questions as he ducked into a stairwell.
Bleaching Blonde
Mindy Tucker Fletcher, spokeswoman for the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, holding Republican “caging lists,” which the party planned to use to bleach voter rolls whiter than white in Florida.
Half an hour later, Mindy, painted with fresh makeup, a retinue of jumpy PR men in tow, asked to speak to our cameras.
Suddenly, she was an expert on caging lists. She began, “Clearly you don’t know a lot about politics if you don’t know this term ‘caging.’”
With the list in her hand she could not deny its authenticity, but there was an explanation. There is always an explanation.
Joseph Agostini, the Republicans’ Director of Communications, nervously sputtered that the lists were made up of potential donors to the Bush-Cheney campaign. Really? On the one list we gave them were several residents at the Sulzbacher Center, a shelter for the homeless. “Do you get a lot of major donors from poor, African-American neighborhoods?”
Mindy cut Agostini off with a “shut it, fool” glare and stepped in with a different line altogether. “These are newly registered voters we mailed to, where the letter came back—bad addresses.”
No kidding. No one sends campaign junk mail first class; it’s too expensive—unless you had a reason to pay for a very expensive set of return addresses. Mr. Agostini, you wouldn’t be preparing to challenge the votes of these Black folk, would you?
Agostini started jabbering. “You see, we wanted to save on the cost of postage for our campaign mailings so we wouldn’t be sending to the wrong address…”
“You’re telling me, Mr. Agostini, that you send clerical information, mailing address changes, to the chiefs of your state and national campaigns? You don’t have an office clerk handle it?”
Mindy shut him down with another “shut your gap” look. It was time for the boss lady to take over.
“This is not a challenge list,” Mindy said. “That’s not what it’s set up to be.”
“So you won’t use these lists to challenge voters on Election Day?
“Uh, that’s not what they were created to do.”
Three points for Mindy: well-crafted words. Using the list might be legal, but creating the list to bleach the voter rolls white is not.
“Will you challenge voters on Election Day?”
Mindy: “Where it’s stated in the law, yeah.”
She saw my eyes widen, so she added, “Every one does it, both parties, all the time. You can check.”
We did. Everyone does not “do it.” Certainly not in Florida. Our investigators called a dozen county elections offices. Not one of them could recall a single Election Day challenge in their career, especially since the enactment of the federal law in 1965.
More confidential RNC caging lists poured in: hit lists of African-American voters, including students of Edward Waters College, an African-American school, and the Jacksonville State Street Rescue Mission (more Bush campaign donors, Mr. Agostini?). Voters in Black precincts made the list if a first-class letter sent to them was returned—they could then be challenged based on an address change. We checked one list that included fifty black soldiers. We called one, Randall Prausa. His wife indicated that his address had changed because he was shipped overseas. Go to Baghdad, lose your vote. Nice. A Black soldier’s vote gone. Mission accomplished.
On October 26, 2004, a week before the election, we broke the story on BBC Television’s Newsnight. According to the network, it was the most-watched story around the globe that week. But not in the USA. Only one single U.S. television network mentioned what looked like a massive attack planned against Black voters. ABC Television’s Web site informed its patrons that “The entire BBC story was more or less entirely incorrect.” Really? ABC’s source: Mindy Tucker Fletcher. For the USA, it was story over and buried.
On November 2, they did it as we feared. The Republican Party, despite the consent decree signed twenty-five years earlier, launched a massive multimillion-dollar campaign of mass challenges of voters in Black precincts, concentrating on Ohio, where the GOP worked from a list of 35,000 names. NAACP lawyers attempting to stop the party’s racially weighted challenges were frustrated by Ohio’s Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell. The Republican claimed, with some justification, that the Ohio Republican party didn’t break the law: The court order only barred racially targeted challenges by the Republican National Committee. In Florida, prudently, Republican operators did not carry the lists, because Democratic lawyers, who saw our broadcast, said they would file suit. But the Republicans challenged thousands nonetheless in Florida, as well as in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The United States hadn’t seen such a mass challenge to dark-skinned voters since Martin Luther King was jailed in Birmingham.
The caging memo distribution list makes clear the Republican National Committee was into it up to their necks notwithstanding the 1981 no-race-baiting consent decree and the Voting Rights Act. Protecting the “caged” was the job of Attorney Gener
al John Ashcroft. But Ashcroft did nothing. I should note that before Mindy became flak-catcher for the Bush campaign, she was press spokesperson for Attorney General John Ashcroft.
In fairness, I acknowledge that Republican lists did not target only Black people. In Palm Beach, they hit retirement areas for elderly Jews, another ethnic demographic that cussedly insisted on voting for Democrat.
The Ballot at the Back of the Bus
But a challenge to a vote does not itself block a citizen’s taking a ballot or prevent its counting. Here’s where scamming the vote gets truly complex and deliciously devious.
It comes down to something called a “provisional ballot,” a whole new category of mischief created just for the 2004 race. “Provisional” ballots are baloney ballots, kind of a voting placebo. A provisional voter thinks his or her vote counted when it’s likely to have been tossed in the garbage. A whole new category of “spoilage.”
Like all bad ideas, provisional voting started out as a good idea. It originated with the Congressional Black Caucus reaction to the Guardian and BBC reports uncovering, in the 2000 election race, that tens of thousands of African-American voters were wrongly erased from Florida voter rolls just before the election. That story didn’t make it to American TV, but Congressional Black Caucus members got the word and got real steamed. Rep. Corinne Brown of Jacksonville, minutes after watching the BBC film on video, marched onto the floor of Congress and denounced the 2000 election as “the United States’ coup d’état.” For that simple recitation of fact, the Republican majority voted to censure her, a rare punishment from which even thieves, scoundrels and senators have been spared.
Congresswoman Brown and the Black Caucus demanded a procedure that would allow a voter to get a ballot even if his or her name is missing from the rolls. The ballot would be kept aside, marked “provisional,” yet would still be counted, on review, once the polls closed. Some states already had “affidavit” ballots and it was assumed that, like affidavit ballots, the provisionals would be counted unless there was evidence a voter was lying, an extremely rare occurrence.
Caging Lists, Republican Party
So, the Black Caucus demanded provisional voting. Then, in 2002, something terribly suspicious happened: The Republicans agreed.
Why? A newfound commitment to civil rights by the party of Lincoln? Or an invitation by the spider to dine with the fly?
The “provisional” ballot was the Republican’s come-on for the Congressional Black Caucus to support something called the “Help America Vote Act.” The Black Caucus should have known: When the Bush family tells us they are going to “help” us vote, look out. George Bush signed it in 2002, grinning.
In the new law, the Black Caucus won the requirement that states hand out provisional ballots. The law requires states to give out the provisional ballots, but it does not require states to count them.
And they didn’t. The number of provisional ballots handed out on Election Day 2004 was stunning, utterly unpredicted by its sponsors:
The total number of voters shunted to provisional ballots was 3,107,490.
And the number rejected was even more surprising: 1,090,729
It was breathtaking. A million votes trashed.
How could that have happened? That’s where the “caging lists” and challenges came into play. The wild explosion of provisional ballots did not occur spontaneously. The massive, coordinated challenge campaign was the engine that dragged Black voters to the ballot at the back of the bus.
Two Hats, One Head
November 2, 2004, was a provisional ballot auto-da-fé, a bonfire of the ballot box. Ballots were rejected, effectively tossed away, by the hundreds of thousands. And once again, the provisional voters who were rejected had a dark hue; and there were just enough of these to create that margin of victory for George W. Bush in Iowa, New Mexico and Ohio.
Let’s go back to that little bait-and-switch in the Help America Vote Law: giving ballots to any legitimate voter who requests one, but not requiring the ballot be counted. It was left up to each of the 50 Secretaries of State. And in Ohio, Secretary of State Blackwell announced an odd rule indeed, just days before the election. For decades before the 2004 race, Ohio voters could cast a provisional “affidavit” ballot in any precinct in their county. After all, it’s the same president for everyone in Ohio. Under Blackwell’s new rule, however, if they cast their provisional ballot in the “wrong” precinct, out it would go, uncounted. It was a terribly cute maneuver: In many cases, voters were told not to bother to go to the right precinct because they could vote on the provisional ballot. Often, the “right” precinct was simply another table in the same school gym where they were voting.
Voters left smiling. Then, even if it was later determined the voter was legitimately registered but in the “wrong” precinct, Blackwell, under his new rule, ordered their provisional ballots trashed.
In Ohio, we know of at least 33,998 provisional ballots tossed out, mostly because the voters appeared at the “wrong” precinct.
Did I mention that Secretary of State Blackwell was Co-Chairman of the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign in Ohio? Shades of Katherine Harris. In 2000, Katherine Harris was both Secretary of State of Florida, in charge of the voting machines there, and Co-Chairperson of the Bush-Cheney election campaign. It’s a rule of both ethics and fashion that one shouldn’t wear two hats unless one has two heads. Did Mr. Blackwell feel a wee uncomfortable reenacting both the creepy conflicts and two-hats-one-head methods of Katherine Harris? Blackwell himself felt very comfortable indeed. “Last time I checked,” Blackwell said, “Katherine Harris wasn’t in a soup line, she’s in Congress.” Well, hats off to them both.
On election night, I called Santiago Juárez, who shepherded the nonpartisan get-out-the-vote drive for the Catholic Church in Las Cruces, New Mexico, a state I knew to be whisker close. “They’re handing out provisional ballots like candy to Mexicanos,” he told me. Any pretext was used. Most important, officials refused to count 6,593 of them, more than Bush’s New Mexico “victory margin.”
And so on. In Colorado, poll watchers noted the extraordinarily high number of Hispanic voters hustled to the “provisional” booth. Twelve thousand provisional ballots were then voided by rulings from the Republican Secretary of State.
In Nevada, one of the closest states of all, where both Native Americans and Hispanics were deluged with provisional ballots, the Republican Secretary of State rejected an astonishing 60% of the provisional ballots. Some Nevada voters were handed the provisionals because their registration forms were not recorded—and then had their votes voided. They’d been collected by an outfit with the do-gooder name of Voter Outreach, which was funded by Arizona operatives of Sproul & Associates which, Congressional investigators discovered, was in turn funded by the Republican National Committee. They collected registration forms, all right, then, says an insider in a sworn affidavit, “Voter Outreach” recorded the Republican ones.
Spoiled Rotten
Let’s get back into those Ohio “boots”—the “overwhelming” match of Cleveland area of ballots spoiled, not counted. The term “overwhelming” to describe the connection between race and ballots lost is not mine. That’s the conclusion of Professor Mark Salling of Cleveland State University, the expert who first noticed the Black Stain of votes not counted in Ohio.
Even more interesting than Salling’s finding is the year in which he reported his conclusion: 2003. In other words, the professor, looking into the historical records of voting in Ohio, sounded the alarm before the election. The academic’s warning wasn’t ignored. Secretary of State Blackwell, the man with two hats, wrote before the election,
The possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device, invites a Florida-like calamity.
Blackwell appears here to be trying to prevent the “calamity.” But appearances can deceive. In practice, the steps he took were making darn sure it would happen again. It did. What’s he
got against Black folk? Nothing. (In fact, his parents are African-American.) It’s just that Republican Blackwell had to know that Black citizens “overwhelmingly” vote Democratic. Throw out dark-voter ballots and Republicans do a lot better. Bending elections isn’t rocket science.
That is, the basics of a vote heist is simple: “Spoil” the other guy’s ballots. But the details are obscure, little understood, rarely noticed and almost never discovered, and if discovered, well, tough luck.
How do votes spoil? Not by leaving them out of the fridge. The biggest spoilers are the “overvote” and the “undervote.” Put a stray mark on a ballot—an “overvote”—and it’s spoiled, tossed out. Fail to pop a hole deep enough through a punch-card ballot and your ballot is also ruined. This is an “undervote,” which is also tossed out. And you, Mr. and Mrs. Voter, don’t even know your vote was thrown away—so you can’t complain about it. You was robbed, but you’re not sure. And even if you knew it, the elections cop to call would be… Mr. Blackwell.
Now to Mr. Blackwell’s comment about punch-card machines. Punch-card machines, which most states dumped after the 2000 race, are ballot-spoiling machines. It’s absurdly easy to fail to punch through correctly, leaving “hanging chads” and “pregnant chads.” It was those “hanging chads” and “overvotes” in overwhelmingly Black precincts that gave Florida to George Bush in 2000. And, in 2004 in Ohio, chads hung Kerry as well.