According to a recent national survey by Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates, Bush has a slight lead over Kerry in an unweighted poll. But if you weigh the minority vote to the turnout shown in the 2000 exit polls, Kerry has over a 3% lead. This, among other factors, has lead a number of people in the left blogoshere to level charges that the Republicans are engaged in a campaign to suppress minority voting.
“Come on,” you may be thinking. “This is 2004. America abandoned those kind of practices decades ago.”
Have we?
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.”
So what are national Bush/Cheney campaign people doing with Jacksonville voter lists?
The one good thing about this election–in contrast to 2000–is that there’s going to be a boatload of people monitoring the polls during the election, not just after the fact. It’s going to be more difficult for the vote suppressors to get away with doing their dirty work.