Everybody gets junk mail, even after you move. Sometimes the new inhabitant of your old space might send that Crate and Barrel catalog back to its sender, since your design-loving self no longer resides at this address. This new tenant may have even had good intentions: Save the trees, please don't send your catalog here, since it's not for me! Crate and Barrel will then mark that they should get your new address the next time you swipe your credit card or pick up something in the store. Keeping a record of current and outdated user addresses determined by its mail return status is known as a caging list.
Now that Election 2008 approaches, it is sad to discover that good Samaritans like those may actually be enabling certain groups who look to block registered voters from casting a ballot when their address on file does not match their current address. With voter supression in mind, this form of a caging list is appropriately named vote caging.
Last Friday, David Rosenfield from Miller-McCune wrote a great article about past and potential future Vote Caging by the GOP . He's noted that Ohio election officials are stamping "Do Not Forward" to registered voters who have signed up for an absentee ballot. That means if the resident no longer resides at the address in the voter registration database, the absentee ballot will come straight back to the election officials, never reaching its intended voter. Sounds awful, but it could be worse, since the GOP has used vote caging to challenge over 77,000 votes from 2004 to 2006 , which turns a trusted ballot into a provisional one.
The only way for citizens to avoid this tactic is to keep their voter registration information up to date, or advocate for legislation against caging lists altogether. Yeah. Good luck with that.
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