At It Again…Vote Caging

Here at In One Ear…Out The Other we do make the occasional effort to do targeted articles towards our key reading demographic, younger voters. So I’d like to take the time now to address an issue which may deeply affect hundreds of thousands of young people’s voter participation in the election this year… vote caging.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term allow me to explain. Vote caging is a method of disqualifying voter registration by challenging the primary address used in registration. It works like this. Anyone may request public voter registration records which include the addresses of all registered voters. That group or individual may then send out a mailer to the addresses of all of those registered voters. When the mass mailing, like all mass mailings,  inevitably  receives numerous mailers which have been “returned to sender”, that group may then disqualify the voter as having falsified their primary address.  So one unanswered letter is enough to disqualify someone as a voter.

This may not be a big concern for those of us who check our mail everyday but for certain key demographics it can be devastating to their registration status, amongst them are college students. Students, who may maintain their college address as primary residence, are of course not home for 4 months out of the summer. Young people in general suffer from a  high-level of vagrancy (trust me, I know) often times switching apartments one time a year or more while remaining in the same town. In this shuffle, a lot of mail gets missed. In this manner, a number of college students can be disqualified.

Don’t believe me? Choicepoint, a private datafile company based out of Atlanta, makes it’s income off of doing just that. The company, which is hired by many metropolitan and state governments to do data management, was involved in the disqualifying of the voter registration of over 1,600 members of the military because they failed to reply to a mailing while serving overseas! They also made a “clerical error,” incorrectly listing over 50,000 Hispanics and African-Americans as felons, disqualifying their voter registration. This all occured prior to the 2000 election, which Bush won by a mere 500 votes.

Evidence abounds of Republican vote caging. In 2007 one of the fired U.S. attorneys claimed that he was, “repeatedly urged by his superiors at the Justice Department to investigate allegations of false voter registrations. After his investigations came up short, Iglesias said Republican officials got angry and complained to White House aide Karl Rove. Soon after Iglesias lost his job.”

In 2004 vote caging was used to disqualify the registration of over 30,000 registered voters in the key swing state of Ohio; mostly in urban areas which typically vote Democratic. This year a mailer to just 5 urban Ohio counties recieved back 600,000 letters labeled with “return to sender.” That number is roughly equal to 20% of the electorate in those counties; any of which may be challenged prior to the election and disqualified.

In Virginia, another key swing state, college voters have received somewhat threatening warning from local government discouraging them from registering at the college they live. The warning reads as follows:

The Code of Virginia states that a student must declare a legal residence in order to register. A legal residence can be either a student’s permanent address from home or their current college residence. By making Montgomery County your permanent residence, you have declared your independence from your parents and can no longer be claimed as a dependent on their income tax filings – check with your tax professional. If you have a scholarship attached to your former residence, you could lose this funding. And, if you change your registration to Montgomery County, Virginia Code requires you to change your driver’s license and car registration to your present address within 30 days.

This warning issued even though in 25 years, not a single case of a student losing his/her tax status as a result of voter registration has ever been heard of. Lose your scholarship?

So I compel you, if you’re a college student already registered to vote, do what you must to alert the relevant authorities that you do indeed live at your address.

-Marc-