GOP Plans and Denials to Challenge Foreclosed Voters Examined

By J. Gerald Hebert , Campaign Legal Center Blog. Posted September 29, 2008.

The "lose your house, lose your vote" stories out of two battleground states, Michigan and Ohio continue to occupy space in the media and various blogs. The story just won’t go away.

A federal lawsuit over the plan is pending in Michigan and the U.S. Department of Justice is reviewing the matter. As I reviewed the stories about this issue and have started to gather additional information about some questionable mailings to voters in other states, I was reminded of my days at the Justice Department when we would investigate claims of voter intimidation and voter suppression. Investigations of vote caging and vote suppression schemes usually started out with an admission of some specific practice, followed by a denial of any such plan, followed by a decision to retain legal counsel.

In both Michigan and Ohio, where the issue of challenging the right to vote of those who have received foreclosure notices has arisen, GOP officials did not initially deny there might be such a strategy. They either admitted it, or acknowledged that it might be part of a larger strategy aimed at preventing people from voting who may be ineligible. In other words, they didn’t rule it out. Once the story came out, and public uproar ensued, the GOP officials issued vehement denials.

Let’s look at some of how this story has developed -- it’s easy to see why the story is now in its third week. It’s also easy to see why those who mount legal challenges to plans to challenge voters must be prepared to engage in aggressive discovery if they are going to obtain the true facts.

To begin with, let’s examine the context in which these two stories arose. As I detailed earlier in my primer on the history of vote caging, the GOP has a long history of engaging in voter suppression efforts. The Party has persisted with the practice because it has proven effective. The GOP schemes have also led to injunctions being imposed by the courts barring specific voter suppression efforts. If the claims of possible vote challenges to those who have received foreclosure notices were against a clean historical slate, then such claims might be a little hard to believe. But they aren’t. They arise against a stain of GOP vote suppression extending over a number of decades. To be sure, claims have been made against Democratic Party operatives as well: allegations of paying voters (“walking around money”), voter impersonation, and non-citizen voting. The point of this piece is not to go through the accuracies or inaccuracies of these claims. Instead, this piece is about alleged efforts to suppress the rights of voters who have lost or are losing their homes in Michigan and Ohio, and the history of vote suppression by the GOP which is relevant to this story.

Michigan:

In Michigan, the original story by Eartha Melzer of the Michigan Messenger contained this passage:

"The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

"We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,’ party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week."

Following the release of the story, Mr. Carabelli "denied making the comment and called the report 'a non-story.'"

Note that he didn’t deny talking with Ms. Melzer about the issue and instead tried to downplay the issue: "We were just having a conversation," said Carabelli. Mr. Carabelli then went even further, making the dubious claim that "[w]e have no plans to do anything[.]"

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