Caging: How Republicans
Diminished the Black Vote
By New America Media
In the face
of overwhelming rejection from African-American
voters, instead of trying to woo them, records
show Republicans have been using scurrilous strategies
to damp down their vote.
Highly publicized hearings
conducted by House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers
have cast a light on the inner workings of high-level
Republican operatives and revealed how one of the
U.S. Attorneys President Bush appointed engineered
processes to suppress the black vote in 2004.
Timothy
Griffin, currently U.S. Attorney for the Eastern
District of Arkansas, is an example of high-level
Republicans’ mind-set toward African-Americans
and illustrative of ways political operatives have
diluted the black vote over the years.
As Conyers
and his committee go about trying to pin the tail
on White House bigwigs for wrongdoing in how Griffin
was appointed a U.S. Attorney, African-Americans
concerned about political empowerment should use
the hearings for insight on how Republican strategists
relate to us and our issues. Instead of championing
black causes, the Griffin case illustrates that
though the Republicans talk of pursuing a colorblind
society, the party’s leaders were very color
conscious when it came to disposing of black votes.
In his previous life Tim Griffin was a Special
Assistant to the President and Deputy Director
of the White House Office of Political Affairs.
In the 2000 presidential election campaign he worked
as deputy research director for the Republican
National Committee (RNC). During that period, Griffin
perfected a form of “Direct Mail” professional
business operators use to reach targeted groups
of potential customers by mail. That technique
was the initial phase of RNC processes to suppress
black votes.
The subversive activities were carried
out in 2000 and 2004 in the name of fighting voter
fraud. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Secretary of State
Katherine Harris hired Database Technologies (DBT)
to purge at least 90,000 people from the state’s
voter rolls, falsely identifying them as “convicted
felons.” DBT was paid more than $1 million
in taxpayer money to carry out this operation.
Of those names that were removed, 80 percent were
not felons.
In 2004, Tim was the RNC’s
Research Director and Deputy Communications Director and
the state of Florida was a tempting target in which
black votes represented the difference between
election victory and defeat. Bush campaign leaders
had calculated that they could either: increase
the black vote toward Republicans by 1 or 2 percent
or decrease the black vote for Democrats by a comparable
margin they would succeed in their drive for a
second term. Records show that instead of employing
people and programs to change African- Americans’ opinions
about the Republican Party and its policies and
purposes to get their vote; under Griffin, the
RNC used a process called “caging” to
rid the campaign of many African-Americans’ votes.
RNC operatives challenged the targeted black Florida
voters on the grounds that they did not live at
their registration address. The direct mail operation
sent hundreds of thousands of letters marked “Do
not forward” to listed voters’ homes.
Letters that were returned (”caged”)
were used as evidence to block these voters’ right
to cast a ballot on grounds they were registered
at phony addresses. For the voter’s ballot
to be counted, the onus was on the voter to prove
that their registration was valid. Such voters
are often unfamiliar with their rights and not
willing to spend the time, effort and expense of
to prove their valid registration.
The Florida “caging
lists” were simple Excel spreadsheets with
local voter’s names and addresses. Virtually
every name was in a minority-majority voting precinct.
Cases the Republicans “challenged” at
polls involved letters that had come back as “undeliverable”.
Such letters were used as evidence to block those
voters from obtaining ballots.
It’s questionable
as to whether the RNC’s practices were legal.
What is not in question is Republican leadership’s
preference to waylay African- American voters rather
than woo them. The business the House Committee
should be about is “justice,” and this
case should be pursued to determine wrongdoings
directed at black voters and neutering of our wills
and issues.
