Palast, Progressives and Investigative Journalism

Investigative journalist Greg Palast, one of the most vigorous of all progressive reporters and winner of six Project Censored Awards, originally brought story of the "caging lists" from Duval County, Florida to widespread attention in his report for an October 26^th, 2004 BBC Newsnight program. By doing so, he tried to open up a conversation critical to the future of voting rights in America. "Caging" may be just one way of manipulating the voting roles, but it is possible to use it for keeping a percentage of the poorer, less stable potential voters from exercising their rights.

Over two years have passed since the BBC's original report on the emails, and the story had seemed to fade. Yet, because Palast had based his story on "caging" spreadsheets sent to Tim Griffin, the Director of Research and Communications at the RNC headquarters, it wasn't surprising when the issue was resurrected after Griffin's appointment as U.S. Attorney for Western Arkansas in 2006. The claims that the RNC had engaged in using "caging" to disenfranchise black soldiers sent to Iraq along with thousands of voters from African-American neighborhoods or other minority voters in Democratic precincts were being made across the Internet, on progressive radio and even in congressional hearings. Unfortunately, other than that done for the reporting of Greg Palast, there was no known analysis of the names and addresses on the caging lists with the actual data available from the voter registration files. Until recently, that is: The full analysis is covered in the ePluribus Media Journal article Voter Suppression on June 26, 2007.

For that story, we had contacted the Duval County Director of Elections office to acquire a copy of the voter registration file. Subsequent conversations and requests for additional data (including the lists of voters purged from December 1, 2004 through June 22, 2007) led us to identify discrepancies in some of what had been previously reported about the racial and party make up of the lists. Though we respect Palast and the work he has done, we felt compelled to provide additional analysis.

Palast reported that the names of 1886 voters in Jacksonville, Florida had been found on "caging lists" received by Griffin. According to Palast, "Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called 'caging list.' It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly Black and traditionally Democrat[sic] areas of Jacksonville, Florida."

The claims of caging in 2004 have been repeated by Palast in books and interviews since 2004 and have been often cited as evidence of voter suppression—and, certainly, his charges should be taken seriously. Unfortunately, no one has followed up on Palast's work. Not, that is, until we did. Though our investigation found there were no poll challenges in Duval County in 2004, which would be the most likely way of using the "caging" information, that does not mean that there was no preparation to use "caging," should the need arise. Further investigation, therefore, is needed.

Further investigation is needed also, for we found things that, though they do not negate Palast's findings, show a situation much less clear-cut than he presents. As noted in earlier stories and on blogs, in his book and in press releases, for example, Palast cites one "Randall Prausa" as an example of an African-American serviceman disenfranchised by caging. On page 204 of Armed Madhouse he reports:

We checked one list that included 50 Black soldiers. We called one, Randall Prausa. His wife indicated that his address had changed because he was shipped overseas. Go to Baghdad, lose your vote. Nice. A Black soldier's vote gone. Mission Accomplished.

In addition, in a June 2, 2006 report, by Palast contains this:

Was it deliberate? Oh, my God, yes. I'd like you to take a look at the "caging" lists the Republican National Committee concocted to challenge voters with "suspect" addresses. It included page after page of African-American soldiers, like one Randall Prausa, shipped overseas. Mission accomplished, Mr. President?

The problem with this choice of Randall Prausa to illustrate disenfranchisement of African American servicemen by caging is that Randall Prausa (see the photo above) is not Black. This fact does not put the lie to Palast's conclusion, but does mean that any study of this issue is going to have to be conducted very carefully from here on out.

In its own checking on "caging," ePluribus Media was able to reach Mr. Prausa by email and telephone. Mr. Prausa told us he did previously live at the address listed on the caging list. He also reports that he was deployed overseas and voted by absentee ballot in 2004. Review of the election data we received from the Duval County Election Office confirms that he voted by absentee ballot in 2004 and his ballot was counted. Furthermore, Mr. Prausa claims he has never spoken with Palast. His wife told us she was contacted by the BBC in October 2004, but the question of ethnicity never came up. The Prausas have not been contacted again by the BBC or anyone else about the 2004 election until we contacted them at the end of May 2007. Additionally, we found that of the 50 "soldiers" on the caging list (listing "Naval Air Station" as their address), 43 remained on the Voter Registration roll. Of these, nine are Black, four Hispanic, and twenty-three are white. Nine are registered Democrats (24%) and sixteen are registered Republicans (38%). While this spread of party affiliation does not show that the RNC was not involved in caging to eliminate Black voters, it makes it that much harder to prove that it was.

Caging Lists: The Real Numbers

Zip Code Analysis

Palast refers to ZIP codes in his description. Although the precinct racial statistics are much more powerful in that they assign addresses to smaller windows of registered voters, and regardless, definitive racial information can be obtained from the actual Voter Registration lists, we also performed ZIP code analysis to evaluate Palast's claims. We evaluated all of the ZIP codes on the comprehensive caging list ... more

According Armed Madhouse, in October, 2004 Palast received the two "caging" emails from John Wooden, the owner of the parody websites whiteHouse.org and GeorgeWBush.org. According to Wooden, whom we contacted, the emails were among those collected by his website when people mistakenly sent email to any address ending with "@georgewbush.org." The site's catchall email address was closed October 29, 2004, ending the collecting process. These emails are believed to be authentic Republican National Committee emails accidentally collected by the site when the senders entered dot-org, instead of dot-com.

Palast, on page 200 of Armed Madhouse characterizes the emails:

After our team spent hours going over them, it became clear that virtually every list—GeorgeBush.org captured over 50 of them, with tens of thousands of names—were made up entirely of voters in African-American neighborhoods that we checked against ZIP codes. The lists included the ghettos of Lauderdale, Pompano Beach and a town with the Gone-with-the-Wind name of Plantation, Florida.

On June 16, 2006, Greg Palast posted on his website:

The BBC obtained several dozen confidential emails sent by the Republican's national Research Director and Deputy Communications chief, Tim Griffin to GOP Florida campaign chairman Brett Doster and other party leaders. Attached were spreadsheets marked, "Caging.xls." Each of these contained several hundred to a few thousand voters and their addresses.

Wooden states that he sent the emails containing two "caging lists" (also publicly available on his parody website) to Palast in October, 2004, prior to the first publication of Palast's book in 2006. Palast did not request additional information from Wooden until March, 2007, when Wooden provided the "entire stash" of GeorgeWBush.org emails (totaling 620 emails). Wooden has since provided our researchers with the same cache of emails. Our analysis determined that there are no new attachments with "caging" in the file name and no spreadsheets resembling the "caging" lists that have not previously been made public. A thorough review of the emails from Wooden was completed and no more than two emails sent to Tim Griffin with spreadsheets marked caging attached could be identified. See a more detailed accounting of the emails here.

Caging Lists: Suppression of Minority and Democratic Voters

The main concern with "caging lists" is that they are used to specifically suppress minority votes. The lists were described on page 200 of Armed Madhouse (see quote above) as being "made up entirely of voters in African-American neighborhoods" and by Palast on June 16, 2006 as:

A check of the demographics of the addresses on the "caging lists," as the GOP leaders called them indicated that most were in African-American majority ZIP codes.

On March 28, 2007, Greg Palast posted the following on his website:

And we dug in, decoding, and mapping the voters on what Griffin called, "Caging" lists, spreadsheets with 70,000 names of voters marked for challenge. Overwhelmingly, these were Black and Hispanic voters from Democratic precincts.

In fact, although our analysis found that caging identifies addresses of Black voters more frequently than "white" voters, the caging was not restricted to "Black" precincts. We found the caging list contained addresses from 237 (83%) of Duval County's 285 precincts. Of the sixty precincts where the population is greater than 50% Black ("majority Black"), 97% contained caged addresses. Of the 225 precincts that were not majority Black, only 56% had at least one address caged. When looking at the race of the voters on the list using the Duval County voter registration data, out of 1641 caged voters for whom an exact match could be made, 786 were Black, 81 Hispanic and 583 were white. While the addresses on the list are not geographically exclusive to African-American neighborhoods, Black citizens were disproportionately represented in the caging list. Palast may be onto something, but the evidence is not yet in.

As described in the text, the 25 .csv files attached to one GeorgeWBush.org email do not appear to be caging lists. Furthermore, these lists are sorted by voting precinct, and contain addresses from 23 of Broward County's 816 precincts. In total, Broward County Registered voters are 18.6% Black, 61.7% white and 12.5% Hispanic. Of the 23 selected precincts, only 1 has a higher percentage of Black registered voters than 18.6%. Indeed, of the selected precincts, the Average Black % is 6.2, white % is 72.9 and Hispanic 13.0. Thus, the .csv files do not look like caging lists, and they target Broward precincts with low Black population percentage. They are more consistent with Republican Party "get out the vote" efforts. Of note, The ZIP code corresponding to Plantation Florida, 33211, is included in the .csv files.

When looking at the party affiliation of the voters on the list using Duval County voter registration data, out of 1641 caged voters for whom an exact match could be made, 851 were registered Democrats, 306 registered Republicans and 484 were not affiliated with either of these parties.

Precinct analysis found higher caging rates and a higher total number of addresses in Democratic-leaning precincts than Republican leaning precincts (1234 addresses in 144 precincts in which registered Democrats outnumber Republicans; 509 addresses in 141 precincts in which registered Republicans outnumber Democrats).

However, of the 144 Democratic-leaning precincts, only 69 had a white population less than 50%, whereas 75 had a white population greater than 50%. Thus, claims that caging list addresses were overwhelmingly "Black and Hispanic voters from Democratic precincts" are exaggerated—though worries about "caging" may have some basis in fact.

Our review and analysis of the evidence for caging in the 2004 elections that we have seen and that comes from the GeorgeWBush.org website consists of 2 files comprising one list with 1833 unique names from Florida's Duval County and one separate file listing 21 names in Nevada.

Other emails from this website that Palast had access to prior to March, 2007 do not contain caging lists or anything that could be reasonably considered caging lists. Even after March, 2007, the emails from the website that Palast obtained do not contain any files that could be reasonably considered caging lists. Again, however, we should emphasize that this does not mean that caging was not done or that lists were not prepared for challenging votes, if such would be deemed needed.

Palast, therefore, deserves tremendous credit for bringing the caging lists to public attention. His BBC report on the Florida caging list and the RNC knowledge of Palast's work may have even played a substantial role in preventing caging lists from being used for widespread voter challenges in the 2004 election. Palast's focus on the issue of caging may help prevent unethical or illegal voter suppression in future elections. However, much more research needs to be conducted before we know for sure. What we, piggy-backing on Palast's work, have established is that there is enough evidence that caging may have happened. As Palast has been saying for two years, this possible threat to our most basic right as Americans needs to be thoroughly investigated by an entity with a lot more muscle than we have—preferably by a governmental body that can insist on testimony and on seeing evidence.

If this investigation happens—and it should—the United States will have a great deal to thank Palast for.

ePluribus Media Contributors: BronxDem, publius revolts