As discussed elsewhere here on Kos, Greg Palast has reported on the BBC on a new potential vote scandal in Florida:
A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state's African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals.
Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called "caging list".
It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.
An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day."
Salon, however,
gives the Repubs the benefit of the doubt in their analysis, pointing out that the list may merely be a product of a direct marketing campaign. According to Salon, "so far, we have no way of proving them wrong"
Well, today Atrios provides the proof, an article in the Akron Beacon Journal which describes how voters in Ohio who were targeted by a Republican direct mail campaign are now having their registrations challenged b/c they chose not to accept the registered letters that were sent to them.
Taken together these separate incidents point to a systematic and nationally-coordinated attempt on the part of the Bush campaign/RNC to use this technique to disenfranchise voters in swing states. And, as Salon points out, "the RNC has in fact been accused of these actions before, and in 1987, in response to a civil rights suit, it signed a consent decree pledging not to do this".
Has anyone out there connected any more of the dots on this? Additional examples from other swing states would be particularly useful.
Update [2004-10-29 12:15:28 by mediaddict]: This Washington Post article also reports on the issue, noting that 130,000 RNC mailings were sent to minority voters in Philadelphia.