African-American Voters Scrubbed by Secret GOP Hit List Greg Palast

African-American Voters Scrubbed by Secret GOP Hit List Greg Palast:

The Republican National Committee has a special offer for African-American soldiers: Go to Baghdad, lose your vote.

A confidential campaign directed by GOP party chiefs in October 2004 sought to challenge the ballots of tens of thousands of voters in the last presidential election, virtually all of them cast by residents of Black-majority precincts.
Files from the secret vote-blocking campaign were obtained by BBC Television Newsnight, London. They were attached to emails accidentally sent by Republican operatives to a non-party website.

Joseph Agostini, speaking for the GOP, suggested the lists were of potential donors to the Bush campaign. Oddly, the supposed donor list included residents of the Sulzbacher Center a shelter for homeless families.

LMAO! These guys have brass balls. Potential donor list my ass.

Another spokesperson for the Bush campaign, Mindy Tucker Fletcher, ultimately changed the official response, acknowledging that these were voters, “we mailed to, where the letter came back - bad addresses.”

The party has refused to say why it would mark soldiers as having “bad addresses” subject to challenge when they had been assigned abroad.

The apparent challenge campaign was not inexpensive. The GOP mailed the letters first class, at a total cost likely exceeding millions of dollars, so that the addresses would be returned to “cage” workers.

“This is not a challenge list,” insisted the Republican spokesmistress. However, she modified that assertion by adding, “That’s not what it’s set up to be.”

Right, because that would be a crime. It was also a crime to jam the phones of the New Hampshire Democratic Party in the 2002 election. That didn't stop the NHGOP RNC from doing it though.

A Democratic analysis of phone records introduced at Tobin's criminal trial show he made 115 outgoing calls to the White House between September 17 and November 22, 2002. [21] Two dozen of the calls were made from 9:28 a.m. the day before the election through 2:17 a.m. the night after the voting, a three-day period during which the phone jamming operation was finalized, carried out, and then abruptly shut down.

Wonder who it was in the White House receiving all those calls? Back to our story...

Setting up such a challenge list would be a crime under federal law. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlaws mass challenges of voters where race is a factor in choosing the targeted group.

While the party insisted the lists were not created for the purpose to challenge Black voters, the GOP ultimately offered no other explanation for the mailings. However, Tucker Fletcher asserted Republicans could still employ the list to deny ballots to those they considered suspect voters. When asked if Republicans would use the list to block voters, Tucker Fletcher replied, “Where it’s stated in the law, yeah.”

It is not possible at this time to determine how many on the potential blacklist were ultimately challenged and lost their vote. Soldiers sending in their ballot from abroad would not know their vote was lost because of a challenge.

Hard to believe that a voter supporession scheme in which the data file attached to the emails that expose the scheme is named "Caging.xls" is not a caging scheme. Here's the thing, though. Why the %$#! hasn't this story been reported in the U.S. press? You'd think it was a pretty big deal that the GOP is illegally (allegedly) suppressing the votes of the troops that they so blythely use as political props for their own ends when it suits them.

I want my country back from these criminals.