Editor's note: It has yet to be seen whether the Republican Party's attempts to purge African Americans from the voting rolls in 2004 will rise to become an act that will be long-remembered. Part of the tragedy may well be that it is only within the African Anerican community where the outrage persists.
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 color-blind 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.
NCMOnline.com
http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=1938417cd8a68dc3aaefd907e2adfa3d
