Expert: 'Caging' scheme will backfire on GOP

Election dirty tricks have been known to backfire in the past, and it may be happening again in 2008. According to the author of How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, an alleged scheme to prevent voters who have encountered foreclosure proceedings on their homes from voting in November is "going to work against the Republicans."

Last week, the Michigan Messenger detailed a plan by the McComb County, Michigan Republican party to challenge voters whose names appear on foreclosure lists, describing it as one among numerous such GOP plans to challenge African-Americans and other likely Democratic voters on Election Day in crucial swing states such as Michigan and Ohio.

Olbermann was joined in his discussion of the story by Allen Raymond, who came by his expertise on vote-rigging the hard way, having been imprisoned in 2006 for his involvement in an illegal GOP phone-jamming operation during the 2002 elections.

Raymond explained that this threatened use of foreclose lists is a new form of what is called "vote caging," which has traditionally meant that "you essentially send a first-class letter to a hoursehold where you suspect that that person no longer lives there but where they're still registered to vote. That letter comes back. ... Somebody [at the local polling place] then challenges that vote if that person comes in to vote."

Vote caging first became notorious during the 2004 presidential election, when it was allegedly used against predominently black voters in Florida.

Olbermann asked Raymond whether the foreclosure scheme was "a big play" that might actually prevent some people from voting on Election Day or just an attempt to scare off potential voters through media coverage.

Raymond suggested in response that "ironically, it's actually something that the Obama campaign can use now to gin up intensity. ... It's a bit of a ju-jitsu move. It's going to work against the Republicans."


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