Republicans Purging Black Military Voter Rolls - What Buffalo Soldiers?

In this disturbing story from Greg Palast, we find the Republicans are trying their worst to stop blacks from voting, even if they're in the service overseas in Iraq. This is from the BBC, so it's no wonder we're not hearing about it in our country through our corrupted Republican lapdog media. More below the fold.

This one is ugly, and shows the Republican Party will stop at nothing to screw blacks out of their vote. Apparently a campaign "directed by GOP party chiefs in October 2004" challenged tens of thousands of ballots cast by residents of Black majority precincts, and in particular, "One group of voters wrongly identified by the Republicans as registering to vote from false addresses: servicemen and women sent overseas.

Here’s how the scheme worked: The RNC mailed these voters letters in envelopes marked, “Do not forward”, to be returned to the sender. These letters were mailed to servicemen and women, some stationed overseas, to their US home addresses. The letters then returned to the Bush-Cheney campaign as “undeliverable.”

The lists of soldiers of “undeliverable” letters were transmitted from state headquarters, in this case Florida, to the RNC in Washington. The party could then challenge the voters’ registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballots being counted.

Sleazy backdoor politics that disenfranchise an entire class of citizens is disgusting, but that's Republican politics. They targetted a bunch of Jacksonville, Florida blacks who are in the military, no doubt because they needed all the congressional seats they could steal. There's more to this neo-Jim Crow strategy:

A soldier returning home in time to vote in November 2004 could also be challenged on the basis of the returned envelope. Soldiers challenged would be required to vote by “provisional” ballot.

Over one million provisional ballots cast in the 2004 race were never counted; over half a million absentee ballots were also rejected. The extraordinary rise in the number of rejected ballots was the result of the widespread multi-state voter challenge campaign by the Republican Party. The operation, of which the purge of Black soldiers was a small part, was the first mass challenge to voting America had seen in two decades.

These sleazeballs will use any rule they can to screw the public out of an honest, democratic election. The BBC is in possession of a few dozen "confidential emails" sent from Repub HQ to Florida Repub HQ and other party leaders. We read "Attached were spreadsheets marked, “Caging.xls.” Each of these contained several hundred to a few thousand voters and their addresses. A check of the demographics of the addresses on the “caging lists,” as the GOP leaders called them indicated that most were in African-American majority zip codes."

The election supervisor of the state capitol of Florida says "The only thing I can think of - African American voters listed like this - these might be individuals that will be challenged if they attempted to vote on Election Day." And we read

These GOP caging lists were obtained by the same BBC team that first exposed the wrongful purge of African-American “felon” voters in 2000 by then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Eliminating the voting rights of those voters — 94,000 were targeted — likely caused Al Gore’s defeat in that race.

In the interests of candor, open government, and coming clean on this, the Repub National Committee refuses to speak about the BBC discovery. However, Florida Repubs blithly toss the lists off as "potential donors to the Bush campaign," even though the would-be "donor lists" contained names of residents of a homeless shelter. Then, in a half-assed effort at explaining, "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 Repubs continue to deny that it's a "challenge list," and claim “That’s not what it’s set up to be.” Yeah, because that's a federal crime under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Unfortunately, black voters overseas would not know that their vote was dumped due to a challenge. And we read "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."

So if you're black and stumble across this article, please go to the link up top where the original article directs you to other sources. Also check out Greg Palast’s discussion with broadcaster Amy Goodman on the Black soldier purge of 2004 at this link. Seems like Republicans are still the party of Jim Crow racism and voter disenfranchisement. When will the majority learn the Republicans are anti-democratic swine?