“It is difficult to explain other than an effort to target Democrats and by extension, minority voters,” Toby Moore, a former political geographer with the Justice Department, said.

transpose "minority voters" and "Democrats" and it will be much more accurate...

I think the word "caging" as we are discussing is now on the Congressional Record a total of 4 times, and each time it's importance was ignored, deffered or trivialized.

But that will change soon, and the word "caging" will be repeated a thousand times in our Congressional Record, until the whole influence and intention of this un-democratic (and patently anti-Democratic) practice is uncovered and completely eliminated from the playbooks of future political campaigns..

I don't understand the arms-length relationship between Greg Palast and Josh Marshall. Is it professional jealosy? A turf war? A mutual dislike? They would seem to be natural allies, trying to reveal the workings of corrupt government. But Josh has been slow to embrace Palast's work, leaving the impression that he's skeptical of Palast's claims. Is Palast claiming more than he can prove? Is he just connecting more dots? Robert F. Kennedy has endorsed Palast's work, but there seems to be an invisible wall holding this story back from being reported in the mainstream media. It's not clear where Josh Masrshall stands on this issue. Can somebody explain his relationship with Greg Palast?

I can explain why everyone in the MSM is at arms length:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/6/26/113923/608

He doesn't appear to do good research.
His Poster Boy for Black Voter Suppression is actually a White Republican.

Thanks for the research! I've been reading widely varying assessments of Palast's claims about Griffin and vote caging and I wondered what was true and what wasn't.

I'm not sure if you looked into these questions. Were the voters on the list registered by ACORN? Were the voters on the list newly registered voters?

Besides challenging voters on Election Day, vote caging could be used to gather "evidence" against ACORN and other left-leaning organizations conducting national voter registration efforts.

Candyce:

The parody site can have their e-mail set up as a 'catch-all' account which, as the name states, will accept any address sent to it in care of the domain name.

We live in a country where we can't even get voting right....that's absurd. Most civilized western countries have proper ID cards and registration. Here in America,....people are against having a good ID card system that would allow us to track all these problems but at the same time these people have the balls to complain that there's a problem.

Candyce,

If you have a domain, you can enable a catch-all, that accepts email addressed to anyone at your website. That's how this happened.

lorelynn

The other possibility is that those who voted didn't have their vote counted because it was a DRE paperless trail machine.

The problems with the voting machines have been documented. In NC hundreds of votes were just "disappeared" by faulty voting machines. Then there's the tampering issue.

If so many African Americans registered to vote it would seem a least some of them would have showed up to vote. What if most of them did and the machines were the problem?

Thanks, lorelynn, that's all I needed to know. I suspected there'd be something like that, but I wanted to be sure. You can see I'm server-challenged.

I don't see how Palast got anything substantially wrong here. If you are arguing what constitutes superior professioanl journalism, that's one thing. But I think Palast go the meat of the matter right and he is the one who made the public aware of "vote caging" and I don't think the MSM has anything to be proud about at this point.

I don't see that Palast got anything substantially wrong here. If you are arguing about who has superior journalistic professionalism, that is one thing. But it was Palast who got to the meat of the matter and brought "vote caging" to the fore. I don't think the MSM has anything to be proud about.

I don't see that Palast got anything substantially wrong here. If you are arguing about who has superior journalistic professionalism, that is one thing. But it was Palast who got to the meat of the matter and brought "vote caging" to the fore. I don't think the MSM has anything to be proud about.

I don't see that Palast got anything substantially wrong here. If you are arguing about who has superior journalistic professionalism, that is one thing. But it was Palast who got to the meat of the matter and brought "vote caging" to the fore. I don't think the MSM has anything to be proud about.

"Since when is registering black voters, voter fraud?"

Since blacks were first allowed to vote?

[Okay, not historically accurate, but I can't resist the snark ... ]

I remember vividly that Rhenquist ruled in a case that statistical inference alone cannot be the basis for a lawsuit against discrimination, and that the plaintiff must show an explicit intent to discriminate on the part of the defendant.

File this as one more example of Republican shenanigans assaulting the law and reason that does not cost them anything.

One thing to keep in mind is that this is RAW data; a preliminary list.... for instance, there is no precinct information available on this spreadsheet.....

In other words, the presence of Republicans on the list is meaningless, as the list required further processing to be used for voter challenges..... In other words, these names would be broken down by precinct, and then handed to the poll watcher at the appropriate precinct where the GOP wanted to challenge/harrass voters.

The part of Greg Palast allegations that never made sense to me were the part about military voters. It would seem to me that if a deployed soldier showed up to vote at home, that would be a good red flag the voter might not be legit.

The Ohio voting roll scrubbed matched a break-in at the state Democratic Party offices in a particular county... www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2004410130378

BTW, mail fraud is the easiest crime to prosecute and prove, and has the most stringent penalties for doing so.

Andrew B

When letters requiring a signature of an addressee are returned, the addressees are put on a list to challange the voter rolls, ie, if no one signed for a letter they may have died or moved and the name should be removed from the roll of eligible voters. Second, if the addressees were deployed military who sent in an asentee ballot, when the absentee allot was sent in it would be challanged because the voters name was on the original caged list.

Eliot,

Jason Leopold's audio interview of Bud Cummins at Truthout.org is very good. Link below.

re bias and intent:
the Consent decrees the RNC is party to in 1982 and again in 1987 require only bias, regardless of intent.

Tom at 2:19:

Isn't it a bit of a stretch to think that Jason Leopold just pulled a story out of his butt, when it came to the "indictment" of Karl Rove?

Anyone with a smidgin of hope for remaining a credible journalist for very long is not about to print a story which is that explosive, based only on rumor and conjecture. It's a slam dunk, therefore, that Leopold did NOT.

Here is a scenario to consider, and then I will support it with background:

The "Sealed vs. Sealed" indictment was, in fact, of Karl Rove, as assessed by the grand jury. But as Fitzgerald made clear numerous times, Scooter Libby "kicked sand" in the face of the investigation, and there was just no way, in Fitz' mind, that he could get a conviction of Rove, based on what he had to work with. Now, stay with me here; this gets good...

Karl Rove personally orchestrated the leak of what was in that "Sealed vs. Sealed" indictment.

Rove knew that due to the stonewalling, Fitz was unable to make much more than a case for perjury with Libby (and a good one; he got HOW many counts of guilty?). Again, Fitz made that clear... and very likely, he angrily told Rove and his lawyers the same, before he told the public.

So Rove discloses to a non-MSM muckraker (via, I have no clue whom) the information that he indeed's the one "indicted". He leaves out the part about Fitz declining to continue (Fitz is such a straight arrow that he's not about to say publicly, "Oh, yeah, Rove's the guy in the sealed indictment").

NOW THINK: where have we seen this before?

1. "Fortunate Son" by the late J.H. Hatfield.

In the run-up to the 2000 elections, author Hatfield wrote a tell-all book on W. As it was going to print, a "source" showed up and gave Hatfield damning evidence of Bush's longtime cocaine use/collision with the law. Hatfield ended up including the information in an appendix to his already-written book.

But before St. Martin's Press could publish "Fortunate Son", a "scandal" broke in the MSM about author Hatfield's criminal past and attempted murder charges. St. Martin's panicked and pulled the book, actually BURNING ALL COPIES ("THX 1138"-- fact or fiction?).

A small publishing house, Soft Skull Press, picked up the book and published it, to a radically smaller audience than it would have had with St. Martin's. But the damage to Hatfield was done, and (allegedly), he "committed suicide" shortly therafter.

The head of Soft Skull subsequently revealed that the "source" who busted W to Jim Hatfield was none other than a nationally-obscure figure (at the time) named Karl Rove.

To my knowledge, this never made the papers.

2. Dan Rather and "kerning".

To this day, it is an accepted fact that the documents used to prove that Shrub AWOL'ed on his TANG duties were fake. THIS FORGERY HAS, IN FACT, NEVER BEEN PROVEN. Only that the docs were not authenticated beyond a shodow of a doubt; enough to get Rather and producer Mary Mapes fired, and the MSM conveniently declaring it a non-story.

And to this day, it is also widely believed that Rove pulled another "Hatfield". Dumped the story in CBS' lap with one hand; raised a red flag over one unprovable document with the other; caused the entire story to go away.

Since the time in Texas when Karl Rove electronically bugged his own candidate and called a press conference about it, to deflect attention from his candidate's lousy debate performances, Karl Rove has been the textbook for the underhanded political fraud known smirkingly since the days of Donald Segretti and company as the "ratfuck".

Back to Tom at 2:19: oh, Karl Rove was indicted, all right. Leopold was probably was shown a photocopy of the indictment, even. The part about Fitz declining to unseal it? They left that out.

We all make mistakes. Leopold's was not printing false information. It was not being ready for a Rovian ratfuck. His bad.

Tom
You're an idiot. This is a VIDEO REPORT! Cummins is doing the speaking. What a closed minded imbecile you are.

eliot and etal,

Very mature to call me names.

Hey, I think dick, bushie, rover, rummy, condi, colon and all the rest should be in Guantanamo.

But I was a working journalist for nearly 30 years and no credible journalist would make the mistakes that Leopold made. I loved his writing and I desperately wanted it to be true, but for whatever reason he got it very very very wrong and made himself (and the cause of justice) a laughingstock.

(My own personal conspiracy theory is that Fitzgerald kept his job by not indicting Rover.)

I will not read anyone who is that big a liar or a fool -- just as I will not read Novakula or Will or Broder.

And, yes, I know full well that the Washington Post and the New York Times basically act as mouthpieces for the bushie administration.

Come on, folks, don't go flaming until you know what someone is saying.

Few comments....first, ACORN has registered more new voters in the last 4 to 6 years (at least 2 million) than any other organization, thus they have become a target. Second, as an earlier post noted, ACORN was a victim of some of its canvassing staff submitting inaccurate registrations. But, important to note, this was less the 1% of voter registrations that it received and in most states, it was mandatory under law for the organization to turn all voter registration cards in, whether they are complete, incomplete, falling apart or suspicious. As a result, ACORN submitted cards and noted to local boards of elections that they found some that didn't seem right and aided those boards in their investigations of individual former employees. Finally, in terms of caging, this is an old school tactic that the Republicans have been using around the country, including Ohio in 2004, before the election. In 04 Republicans used "pre-challenges", letters sent out by the Republican party demanding that voters contact them in order to prove they are real voter only a week before the election. This mailing from the party was targeted to low to moderate income, mostly minority communities that simply did not return mail to the republican party. As a result of this "no return letter" the Republican Party attempted to disqualify voters, purging part of the roles, I believe the Ohio number was 32,000+ voters statewide. These voters were overwhelmingly in low to moderate income and minority communities.... ACORN played a role halting this by issuing a report using census tract data as well as working to getting plaintiffs to for both local and federal cases. An ACORN member was the lead plaintiff in a federal case out of New Jersey around how caging was illegal. If you call ACORN's national office they could give even more info on this.

Barry,

Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but in 30 years I never published a word under my byline that I hadn't verified with three independent sources. That used to be the rule of journalism.

I agree with you in that I believe the bushies were behind the Fortunate Son and Rather episodes. But, again, the authors of those stories allowed themselves to get 'punked' as you put it. They allowed basically factual stories to be killed and buried by not crossing all their t's and dotting all their i's. Who does that make the enablers?

Otherwise, it's just opinion, which is what Leopold deals in (check his background). And as they say, opinions are like assholes, everybody has one. Journalism deals in facts.

That's what I admire so much about the gang at TPM, they do their homework. And when they make the occasional misstep, as we all do, they immediately correct themselves. I feel I can trust them.

'Nuff of that!