Project Vote Report Accuses GOP of Decades of Voter Suppression

In 2004, Republicans used a Jim Crow-era tactic to target the voter registrations of a half-million likely Democratic voters -- often minorities -- for Election Day challenges in nine states, a national voting rights group has charged in a new report.

"The intended effect of voter caging operations is to suppress minority votes," Project Vote said in its report, "Caging: A Fifty-Year History of Partisan Challenges to Minority Voters. "Several court decisions and occasional public comment by Republican officials lend support to this conclusion."

But Republicans say Project Vote's report is biased because it excludes Democratic examples of filing fraudulent voter registrations to pad voter rolls and because it ignores Democratic efforts to "knock" opponents off the ballot, such as Ralph Nader in 2004, after identifying fraudulent signatures on his nominating petitions.

"When you send out a letter to people who have registered recently and the letter comes back as an address of an empty lot or is undeliverable, you tell me is that fraud or not?" said Heather Heidelbaugh, Republican National Lawyers Association vice president for Election Education. "When people say to me there is no such thing as evidence to commit voter fraud, it is false. I've seen it. I've witnessed it. I've lived through it."

Project Vote's report is likely to draw more congressional scrutiny of tactics that may continue in the upcoming presidential election. Since 2004, three battleground states -- Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania -- have "made it easier for private individuals to challenge a voter's eligibility," the report said, while two states, Washington and Minnesota, have passed laws "making it harder."

While the report -- like many Democrats -- says the GOP is relying on voter suppression methods developed in once-segregated South, Republicans like Heidelbaugh say mass registration drives intended to bring in new Democratic voters often are rife with errors that can be used to pad vote totals. She defended the GOP's use of mailings to identify voters to be challenged on Election Day as a legitimate tool to ensure fair elections.

"Both sides should recognize that voter fraud exists and both sides should want to minimize it without prohibiting anybody's right to vote," Heidelbaugh said. "The integrity of elections has to be maintained for the credibility of the system."

Project Vote organizes voter registration drives among low-income voters and in 2004 worked with ACORN, another low-income advocacy group, to register 2.3 million people across the country. In several states, ACORN workers filed a handful of registrations that were shown to be false and some of its workers were subsequently tried and convicted. That relationship undermines the credibility of the Project Vote report, said Heidelbaugh, who was Election Counsel in Pennsylvania for the Bush/Cheney '04 Campaign.

"It is telling me what I have seen for 23 years doesn't exist," she said. "It is a waste of my time to hear ACORN, which has been indicted for voter fraud, say that voter fraud doesn't exist."

Project Vote Deputy Director Michael Slater said GOP criticism of his group's ties to ACORN was fair, but he said Project Group, which is non-partisan, did not find any evidence that Democrats had used the same "caging" tactic to try to repress likely Republican supporters from voting.

"We didn't target the Republicans in our research," Slater said. "We did a broad review, using multiple sets of tools and didn't find incidents of Democratic voter caging. If we missed something, we'd like to know about it. We think vote caging is a problem. If Democrats did it we'd want it stopped as well."

The Republican National Committee did not return phone calls to comment. However other RNLA members, who often oversee their party's Election Day legal activities at the state level, said the voter challenges could reappear in 2008.