Twelve senators introduce bill to outlaw voter 'caging'

In a press release late Monday afternoon, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) announced that he had introduced legislation to ban the practice of "voter caging," a practice in which groups send mail to voters' addresses and then use "return to sender" envelopes to challenge the legitimacy of individual votes.

Wikipedia defines 'caging' as "a term of art in the direct mail industry, as well as a term applied to a technique of voter suppression. A caging list is a list or database of addresses, updated after a mailing program is completed, with notations on responses received from recipients, with corrections for addresses that mail has been returned undelivered from, or forwarded onward from."

In October 2004, the BBC reported on a list of "caging" targets that had been culled from an email allegedly sent by the Bush campaign. The email, which was errantly sent to GeorgeWBush.org instead of GeorgeWBush.com, contained "a list of 1,886 voter names and addresses in largely African-American and Democratic areas of Jacksonville."

“The practice of ‘caging’ is reprehensible and has absolutely no place in our democracy," Kerry said in the release. "Here in America, every citizen, regardless of race, gender, religion or sexual orientation has the right to cast his or her vote. These are the very foundations of our democracy and this bill will ensure that we protect fundamental freedoms for millions of voters across our country.”

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Senators Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) joined Kerry as cosponsors of the Caging Prohibition Act. To date, the bill has also been endorsed by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and People for the American Way.

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Kerry_introduces_legislation_to_outlaw_voter_1105.html

Greg Palast has been talking about it for months now.

I suspect that the Senators and their staff needed to seriously review both the practice in whatever ways it is employed and election law. Here, you would need to differentiate attempts to clean the voting rolls with attempted disenfranchisement. (If NJ is typical, you hit a lot of disconnected numbers or are told people are deceased when you call.)

the powers that be haven't done one damn thing to enforce it.

Bobby Kennedy Jr, the voting rights lawyer does. This is an excerpt of an interview from Buzzflash, at http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/interviews/061

What you have exposed is, in essence --

Greg Palast: A criminal conspiracy, according to Bobby Kennedy. The BBC requires me to work with lawyers so that I don’t just shoot my mouth off on legal stuff. And Bobby Kennedy, Jr., is a law professor and an expert on voting rights law. And his father gave his life for voting rights, too, don’t forget. Bobby Kennedy says that what we have here is a criminal conspiracy to commit felony manipulation of the voter system. It violates endless numbers of laws. These people really need to be not in office, but in prison. He’s not a guy given to much excitement, but when he looked at the evidence in Armed Madhouse, he just flipped. And what’s driving him crazy as well is that Karl Rove is right. The U.S. media is not picking up the investigation.

BuzzFlash: That’s why I want to say that people should read your book and follow your website and your articles.

Greg Palast: They should stay on with BuzzFlash because, yes, a lot of my stuff will eventually get picked up by the U.S. media. They may say "there are accusations within the blogosphere," because it’s on BuzzFlash. But, of course, this started out with a massive, high-level investigation for the BBC Television network. I’m proud to give it to BuzzFlash because we sure as hell ain’t getting it into the Washington Pravda Post. We aren’t getting into the New York Judith Miller Times. And I’m glad to say that you’re growing and they’re dying, and that’s the way it ought to be.

BuzzFlash: It is such a massive assault on the voting system and felony suppression of rights in many ways, as we’ve pointed out. They’re coming at it from all angles. For instance, in prosecutor-gate, they’re using prosecutors to kind of gin up accusations of voter fraud that don’t exist just to win elections. And then when the elections are over, they get Republicans and state legislatures to cry, oh, that was terrible, even though nothing was ever prosecuted. We need new Jim Crow voter laws to keep people who shouldn’t vote from voting, to prevent fraud that never existed.

Greg Palast: Right now, I’m following up with another story that involves prosecutor-gate. I’m speaking to one of the fired prosecutors' offices -- David Iglesias. Rove had this whole scheme. While he’s stealing votes with both hands -- I mean, literally -- he is, at the same time, coming up with this scheme to accuse Democrats of registering illegal aliens and encouraging massive voter ID theft. It’s a complete goofy scheme. And what they did is try to involve the U.S. attorneys in bringing prosecution. For example, in New Mexico, they wanted David Iglesias. Rove’s people told me that. Rove’s people claimed that there were 150 cases of voter ID theft in New Mexico. And I said, “Well, then send them to me.” And they said, “Well.”

It’s in the book. And they said, “Well, David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney, will back us up.” So I called his office. And they refused to back it up. They said, “Well, we don’t really have an open investigation on this.”

Kudos to JK and the co-signers.

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I find it rather strange that there is little response to him actually introducing LEGISLATION, that, you know, actually does something to deal with election shenanigans perpetrated by the GOP. I am becoming suspicious that a lot of people act like they care about this issue, when in fact, they're far more interested in gunning for Kerry. Why, I do not know. He's a good solid liberal senator representing Mass. He's on our side on issues people care about here, I would say, 99% of the time. He's one of the good guys, and he's doing good work here.

Not even one of them, even the so-called moderates, could be bothered to stand up for this. But I can't say I'm surprised - I mean, it's only the way their party clings to any kind of power.