Blogged by Brad…breaking as I must head over to the studio to the Peter B. Collins Show today…
Bad news for the RNC. New emails reveal their “Voter Fraud Strategy Conference Call” just prior to the 2004 Presidential elections, with plans to use Vote Caging lists to challenge voters in swings states from OH to PA to FL to NM. The effort seems to have been spearheaded by Tim Griffin.
Truthout gets the scoop and the collections of emails, as based on a report from PBS’s NOW to air tomorrow night. Here’s the skinny…
The documents also contain details describing how Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign officials, and at least one individual who worked for White House political adviser Karl Rove, planned to stop minorities residing in Cuyahoga County from voting on election day.
The efforts to purge voters from registration rolls was spearheaded by Tim Griffin, a former Republican National Committee opposition researcher. Griffin recently resigned from his post as interim US attorney for Little Rock Arkansas. His predecessor, Bud Cummins, was forced out to make way for Griffin.
Another set of documents, 43 pages of emails, provided to Truthout by the PBS news program “NOW,” contains blueprints for a massive effort undertaken by RNC operatives in 2004, to challenge the eligibility of voters expected to support Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in states such as Nevada, New Mexico, Florida and Pennsylvania.
One email, dated September 30, 2004, and sent to a dozen or so staffers on the Bush-Cheney campaign and the RNC, under the subject line “voter fraud strategy conference call,” describes how campaign staffers planned to challenge the veracity of votes in a handful of battleground states in the event of a Democratic victory.
Furthermore, the emails show the Bush-Cheney campaign and RNC staffers compiled voter-challenge lists that targeted probable Democratic voters in at least five states: New Mexico, Ohio, Florida, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Voting rights lawyers have made allegations of so called “vote caging,” against Republicans previously. These emails provide more evidence. One Republican operative involved in the planning wrote “we can do this in NV, FL, PA and NM because we have a list to run against the Absentee Ballot requests, and should.”
Truthout has a bevy of emails that I haven’t been able to review, but we’ll have the producer of tomorrow’s NOW story on the Peter B. Collins Show tomorrow (which I’m still Guest Hosting through the end of the week) to discuss this story.
And yes, Bush/Cheney ’04 Inc’s national general counsel, who would later go on to create the phony “grassroots” GOP front-group, American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR), was right there in the thick of it all…
Other participants for the conference call included Mark “Thor” Hearne. Hearne is closely aligned with Karl Rove and the RNC and has been accused of pushing for the firings of some US attorneys by at least one of the fired attorneys. Some of the attorneys believe they were fired based on their refusal to prosecute alleged cases of voter fraud.
Emails among Ohio Republican Party official Michael Magan, Coddy Johnson, then national field director of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, and Timothy Griffin, reveal the men were given documents that could be used as evidence to justify widespread voter challenges if the Bush campaign needed to contest the election results. Johnson referred to the documents as a “goldmine.”
The valuable documents were lists of registered voters who did not return address confirmation forms to the Ohio Board of Elections. The Republican operatives compared this list with lists of voters who requested absentee ballots. In the opinion of one of the strategists, the fact that many names appeared on both lists was evidence of voter fraud. “A bad registration card can be an accident or fraud. A bad card AND an Absentee Ballot request is a clear case of fraud,” according to former Bush-Cheney campaign staffer Robert Paduchik.
…
The list of questionable voters that was compiled by the Ohio Board of Elections was quite similar to the vote caging lists used by the Republican campaigners. The Board of Elections sent out voter confirmation letters to targeted registered voters. The letters required the voter to return a confirmation request or have their name removed from the voter rolls. Because the confirmation letter gave the voter 60 days to respond, a voter who failed to respond to the confirmation request would still be on the voter rolls for the primary election, but would be purged prior to the general election.
Check out Truthout for the complete report and all of the emails…
Brad,
Truthout is mistaken about these emails. They weren’t just released even if Truthout only got them from the NOW program producers. They were part of the litigation to stop the GOP from challenging voters at the polls in Ohio in 2004 and have been in the public domain for over two years.
Assuming Lori is right, then this is yet another case of MSM burying anything that would show Bush to be a pretender to the thrown.
Thank God they are now getting much wider coverage.
Don’t forgot, Karl had The Math. You know, the one where 2 + 2 = 0.
Karl, the Dems aren’t the zero, YOU ARE!!!
When you’re summering, falling, wintering and springing in the Iron Bar Hotel in The Gated Community, please feel free to add a tally mark to your cell wall each day. This will be your remedial course in The Math.
– Tom
I just emailed Leopold and he emailed me back. SOME of these emails and documents were previously released but the first 10 pages weren’t so the above commented is wrong. The documents that say “voter registration fraud strategy” have never been released publicly
Leopold is wrong. The emails to which you refer, dated September 30, 2004, with the subject line, “Voter Reg Fraud Strategy conference calls,” not, as the Truthout article states, “voter fraud strategy conference call,” is marked Exhibit 7 of “Memorandum In Support of Intervenor’s Motion for a Preliminary Injunction,” filed 11/1/04 in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, Civil Action No.l 81-3876. This is the now well-known case, DNC vs. RNC, which produced the consent decrees that were supposed to monitor the GOP’s racially-targeted ballot security programs. In October 2004, a voter in Ohio who found herself on a challenge list allegedly prepared in violation of the consent decrees petitioned the court to re-open the case. The documents linked to in the Truthout article and which appear to be the basis for the article, including the “43 pages of emails, provided to Truthout by the PBS news program ‘NOW,'” are available to the public through the Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER system, at 8 cents a page to view or download. The docket for the case indicates that these documents were last modified on 1/24/05, so they’ve been available for public viewing for over two years.
On the Colbert Report, Robert Shrum just said that Kerry would’ve been president if DIEBOLD e-vote machines weren’t rigged.
So they’ve been available for two years. But guess what? Nobody has ever written about that particular set of emails before. Also, Pacer is not a what I would call a news site so just because it may be sitting there for two years doesn’t mean it has been previously reported or disclosed. So you’re wrong, Lori. I have checked the internet thoroughly and those emails about the conference call are nowhere. so it is “news” no matter how you cut it. There are plenty of people out here who have no idea about this and just because you know doesn’t mean everyone does. Care to answer the question as to why this hasn’t been out publicly?
Yes, a corrupt voter suppression scheme, but not the best quality corruption laundered money can buy.
That has the reds very, very upset. Upset to the point of making fun of bushies of all things:
(Red State, emphasis added).
This all gives new meaning 🙂 to “better red than dead“.
They think Gonzales should be persuaded to go fishing so damage to the reds will be minimized. However, he will get the point more clearly if the suggestion is made that he go hunting with tricky Dick “Hair Trigger” Cheney.
Dear Adam Hillstein,
I’ll respond because you challenged me, but I’ve got other work to do so I can’t take more time for this after my response. You misunderstand me. My only point was that the Truthout story misrepresents where the emails originated and exaggerates their revelatory character. Credibility in news reporting can be undermined when the details are wrong. The emails were not previously undisclosed — they were made public through litigation and no doubt influenced the District Court judge to find that the RNC violated the consent decree because they demonstrate an RNC connection to the caging effort (that order was stayed on appeal and then the case was dismissed after the voter who brought the complaint was able to vote, making the case moot). That you find no reference to any news story about the specific emails you’re focused on isn’t relevant. The issue of voter caging in Ohio in the 2004 presidential election and the litigation to stop it was reported on at the time by the New York Times and other newspapers, picked up on blogs, described in the (1/05) Conyers Report and mentioned in Robert Kennedy’s article, “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” in Rolling Stone magazine last year. While these stories may not have reproduced or mentioned the specific emails about setting up a conference call (did the call happen? what was said? who said what? what happened as a result? was Karl Rove involed? — answers to these questions are important and unknown), they reported on the caging initiative and the litigation where the plaintiff’s lawyers entered the emails into the public record. Leopold and Renner could have written a newsworthy story about the emails as “little noticed,” or something to that effect but they don’t seem to know where the emails they are “disclosing” originated.
Why quibble over whether the voter fraud went public or not—-the important thing is that what happened was wrong, and how do we go about correcting it, and not burying it—-again! And, incidentally, how do we go about prosecuting the propigators? This is NEWS—where is the news media to publicize it?
Lori is right about the provenance of the emails. The GOP attached the emails to a court pleading in DEFENSE of 2004 charges that it violated a 1987 consent decree. The consent decree required the RNC to get court approval before it engaged in so-called ballot security programs.
The GOP made the emails public record. But no one seems to have talked about them until Monica Goodling made “caging” a topic of interest…or was that Greg Palast in 2004?
I’m not defending Republican voter caging efforts. These guys are working under Jefferson’s “white property owners only” theory of democracy. But, the truthout article errs if it is implying that the emails on ‘voter fraud’ alone reveal unlawful caging. The emails are just a piece of the puzzle.
There’s nothing unlawful about scouring registration rolls for evidence of fraud. What is unlawful is selectively using the info to target minority voters (Voting Rights Act) and/or using it to interfere in select precincts by disruptive mass challenges that have little or no basis (First and Fourteenth Amendment). A piece of returned mail isn’t evidence of a fraudulent registration.
Raise your hand if you think the fraud hounds who wrote these emails were not concerned about voter fraud in Republican districts.
The caging lists are used for suppressing opposition voters and as fodder for pre-election press conferences designed to portray minorities and the opposition as dishonest. But the emails in question don’t come out and say that.
BTW, caging plans are still in the GOP playbook.