Worried about vote caging? You should be. Republicans have spent the past decade throwing voters off the rolls, and they are trying it again all over the country. This is how they win, by disenfranchising citizens. It worked in 2000, it worked in 2004, and they will be damned if they won't try to make it work in 2008 so they can install John McCain as President.
Today comes a new effort to fight disenfranchisement this fall, one that claims to be the largest voter-protection effort in American history. News below the fold, but if you have questions or see problems with voter registration, call 1-866-OUR-VOTE. Lawyers are standing by to fight for our rights.
From TPM:
A group of civil rights lawyers is launching what it bills as the largest voter-protection effort in American history, planning to raise and spend millions of dollars to station hundreds of lawyers and thousands of volunteers at polling places across the country to help voters having trouble with the polls on Election Day.
The non-partisan group, called Election Protection -- to be announced at a press conference later this morning -- is being headed up by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a legal group established in 1963 in the heat of the Civil Rights Movement....
"This will be the largest voter protection effort in the history of the country," project head Jonah Goldman, a longtime civil rights and election reform lawyer, insisted in an interview yesterday with Election Central. The backbone of their effort is a hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE, that voters can call to have their questions answered, and to report problems.
According to Goldman the effort already has $2.5 million in its budget, and plans to employ hundreds of lawyers across the nation (as well as having, he claims, thousands of volunteers on hand) to handle calls of complaint and concern. The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law ran a similar effort in 2004, but what is planned for this fall is much larger and more ambitious than previous efforts.
This move is separate from the Obama-Biden campaign and the DNC, but recall that Obama is the Senator who prevented Bush's master voter-cager Hans Von Spakovsky from getting a seat on the Federal Election Commission. He knows the importance of this issue and will also take steps to fight vote caging (such as helping file suit immediately on the Michigan effort discussed in the link in the header of this diary). But every lawyer and volunteer who can fight the disenfranchisers is welcome.
This will be an ugly fight, but at least our side has troops to fight it. The GOP is terrified of our voter registration efforts (and there's still time to register more, as icebergslim's diary with info on all 50 states makes clear), so it's no wonder they will try this again. Without vote caging, Florida would have gone to Gore by several thousand votes in 2000 and who knows how history would have turned out? Let's not let that happen again.
UPDATE: If you would like to make a donation to the effort, you can do so here.