Florida "Caging" list mapped to prove suppression

The Republican campaign in Florida has assembled a "Caging" list of 1771 voters they expect to challenge at the polls in Duval County alone. Presumably this is going on in every county, and since Duval County represents 4.8% of Florida's 17 million population, we can project that the Republican caging list for the entire state numbers something like 90-100,000 voters they intend to challenge.  

While Duval County is 65% non-Hispanic White, only 44% of those on the list are in predominantly white neighborhoods. Challenging voters at the polls, while technically legal, clearly serves the additional purposes of slowing down the voting process, intimidating voters, and encouraging folk to abandon their place in the resultingly long lines and go home.

map and more discussion after the break.

ACORN has been able to locate most of those caged names on a map, and cross-reference that map to the racial profile of each neighborhood. Here's the data I was given by ACORN:

Census Tract Population          "Caging" List        % of list
0-20% Non-Hispanic White            353                  24%
20-40% N-H White                         175                  11.9%
40-60% N-H White                         298                  20.3%
60-80% N-H White                         427                  29.1%
80-100% N-H White                       216                  14.7%

417 addresses could not be assigned to a census tract on the map, which appears below:

There is nothing random-looking about the dot distribution. Or at least, not about the concentration of dots in the purple center of the least-white section on the map. If I were inclined to believe in the general integrity and honesty of our Republican bretheren, I might imagine that these dots simply represent addresses where mail bounced back because of an address typo in the database, or I might imagine, as the Republican vote challengers clearly do, that these registrations are genuinely suspect.

I have not been so inclined, however, since I was told that we'd be welcomed in Iraq with dancing in the streets, that 70,000 troops were enough to secure Post War Iraq, or that we knew where Saddam was hiding his WMD.

For the longest time in the early '70's, my father continued to have faith in Richard Nixon because he just couldn't fathom how somone that smart could be so stupid. There are probably thousands of well-intentioned republicans out there still in denial that an administration with such reassuring rhetoric could be so corrupt, that a vice-president could lie so straight-faced right into the camera, or that our military planning could be so incompetent.

I can't blame them. I don't want to believe it either. That does not, however, mean that we can take our eyes off the prize. There are more than enough twisted, power-hungry, rapacious souls in the Republican Party - that are fighting tooth and nail to make sure they never have to face the consequences of what they have done to the country - to turn the swing-state elections, no matter how much we actually win them by, into a legal brawl that will leave everyone bloody.

I really hate not trusting people, but knowing the ACORN side of the story in Florida, and hearing the Republican distortions and lies about ACORN and ACT and the other 527's in the media - I've just lost, at least for now, the ability to take anything they say at face value.

Which seems to leave us with our determination to GOTV, and the realization that we cannot give a legal inch in the ensuing struggle if it does come to that.

•  posting the map photo . . .

  if anyone can talk me thru how to post the photo so it shows up here, please do so. Thanks!

  by AikidoPilgrim on Thu Oct 28, 2004 at 08:25:47 PM PDT

  •  copy and paste this in your diary

    <img src="http://www.aikidokids.com/DuvalCountyCageMap.jpg" width="500" height="475">

    You might have to tinker with the width and height #s.

    by PitterPatter on Thu Oct 28, 2004 at 08:39:21 PM PDT

    •  thanks! - n/t

      by AikidoPilgrim on Thu Oct 28, 2004 at 09:10:34 PM PDT

•  another good reason to be a Geography major

  GIS (Geographic Information Systems) can do wonders in making this kind of correlation blindingly simple and obvious.

  If a picture = 1000 words and statistics can lie, then a map can tell a thousand lies, so it does require a degree of scrutiny: look at the scale in all dimensions, make sure the factors being plotted and color-charted make sense in comparison. This one passes the smell test at first glance.

  The fact that they're census tracts should create equity in population in each area, but urban ones are smaller so the density is higher... but it does look like there are more dots in the minority tracts, even factoring this in.

  Raines

  by raines on Thu Oct 28, 2004 at 08:51:31 PM PDT

•  Need a new list

  Someone in Florida needs to create a caging list of white republicans. I bet you'd see the tolerance for vote challenging fade in a hurry if old white folks started having their registrations challenged.

  by mataliandy on Thu Oct 28, 2004 at 08:57:12 PM PDT

•  One more piece of information needed

  To really make your case, you'll need to also provide information about population density to demonstrate that they're not simply challenging more people in the areas where there are more people.

  by silence on Thu Oct 28, 2004 at 09:15:28 PM PDT

  •  each section has the same population

    Census tracts are areas that vary in size but which have equal populations - so to the extent that you can see the division lines on the map, that gives you what you're looking for.

    As a general observation, the most crowded areas are disproportionately underclass - simply because richer people insist on, and can afford, more room around them.

    by AikidoPilgrim on Thu Oct 28, 2004 at 11:13:00 PM PDT