"Politics is however, a contact sport."

Action potentials are rising in the amygdala over at Neuroinflammation.net:

Tuesday, October 26, 2004
What does Bush have against renters?

New Florida vote scandal revealed (linked below as well): Greg Palast unearthed a secret list of 1800+ voters the GOP plans on challenging next Tuesday. Go read the article.

It turns out you too can take a look at the same list Greg got his hands on. It turns out numerous GOP operatives would occassionally send email to georgewbush.org instead of georgewbush.com. You can read their (boring) emails here. And you can download the cage files as well.

I did a quick look. All of the voters on the list were from the Jacksonville, FL, area. It is possible that the GOP has lists for other counties in Florida.

40 voters on the list were at the Naval Air Station. I didn’t know the GOP despised soldiers.

31 were students at Edward Waters College, a private, historically black college.

19 voters had listed their primary address at the Mental Health Resource Center. I’m not sure what the sanity requirements are for voting in Florida, but with Jeb as a governor you have to figure sanity isn’t that high a priority.

25 voters listed the Jacksonville New Life Inn as their address. Yup, these were the homeless, the people who actually have more at stake in this and any election than anyone else, being reliant on the kindness of strangers.

I did a quick scan of other repeat addresses (and I leave it to someone else to complete this little project), but by and large the people on this list lived in apartments.

The Georgebush.org site has a link to this BBC article:

New Florida vote scandal feared

By Greg Palast Reporting for BBC's Newsnight

A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state's African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals.

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 areas of Jacksonville, Florida.

An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day." [...]

In Washington, well-known civil rights attorney, Ralph Neas, noted that US federal law prohibits targeting challenges to voters, even if there is a basis for the challenge, if race is a factor in targeting the voters.

The list of Jacksonville voters covers an area with a majority of black residents. [...]

Republican state campaign spokeswoman Mindy Tucker Fletcher stated the list was not put together "in order to create" a challenge list, but refused to say it would not be used in that manner. [...]

There was no explanation as to why such clerical matters would be sent to top officials of the Bush campaign in Florida and Washington. [...]

It is strange that the BBC has this story before the US papers do.  I searched at NyT, WaPo, Boston Globe, and LA Times, and did not find a reference to this story.

BTW, the title of this post, "Politics is however, a contact sport.", comes from one of the Republican emails on the Georgebush.org website.  When will people learn to encrypt sensitive email???

Free digital encryption certificates can be gotten at www.thawte.com.