TPM Does Independent Investigation Supporting Palast's Accusations Of Voter Caging By Rove's Protege

[kpete]

There's been a extremely pointed debate in the blogosphere -- based largely on the reporting of Greg Palast -- about whether Attorney Purge star Tim Griffin did so-called 'voter caging' back in 2004. Specifically, whether he targetted African-American voters in Florida for disqualification at polling places.

The TPMmuckraker staff did an independent investigation of the evidence. And this is their report.


Cage Match: Did Griffin Try to Disenfranchise African-American Voters in 2004?
By Paul Kiel - June 26, 2007

For years, Tim Griffin, the former aide to Karl Rove who’s been at the center of the U.S. attorney controversy, has been dogged by allegations that he was a part of a 2004 scheme to block African-Americans in Florida from voting.

As Greg Palast first reported for the BBC, an August, 2004 email sent to a number of Republican National Committee operatives contained a spreadsheet of the names and addresses of more than 1,800 voters in Duval County, Florida, a mostly white county that includes the city of Jacksonville. Palast reported that the addresses were located in mostly black neighborhoods, and his story, followed by others posted this year on his website and the Brad Blog, alleged that the list was compiled in order to challenge African-American voters at the polls. We sought to test that conclusion through our own analysis of the data.

The result? Our comparative analysis of the spreadsheet with Duval County voter rolls shows that most names were of African-Americans. (For more on the analysis, see below.) Such a finding, voting rights experts told me, strengthened allegations that Griffin, working for the Republican National Committee, was involved in an effort to target African-American voters. “It is difficult to explain other than an effort to target Democrats and by extension, minority voters,” Toby Moore, a former political geographer with the Justice Department, said.



As you can see, most of those on the list were Democrats and most of those were African-American. 57.8% of Duval County voters voted for Bush in the 2004 election. On the other hand, while the list is composed disproportionately of African-Americans, our analysis of the zip codes showed that the mailing was not sent exclusively to predominantly African-American neighborhoods.

much more at:
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003523.php