Caging in the News

by Jonah Goldman

The Politico has a story in this week’s paper about Senator Whitehouse’s Caging Prohibition Act, and uses the problems in Statesboro, GA as a backdrop. 

The article, "Senate bill seeks to restrict vote caging," opens by stating:

In the run-up to the 2007 City Council elections in Statesboro, Ga., a voter registration drive put more than 2,000 new voters on the city’s rolls, most of them students at Georgia Southern University. In a city as small as Statesboro - a few hundred people typically voted in some council districts - the influx of new voters meant candidates backed by college students had the potential to reap big rewards.

But an ad hoc coalition of locals called the Statesboro Citizens for Good Government challenged the new registrants, asking them to be purged from the voter rolls on the grounds that they were not residents of Statesboro under the guidelines of local election law.

Although the challenges were dropped after the election and wouldn’t have been likely to succeed anyway, they were filed so late and in such large numbers that all of the challenged voters were forced to vote on special paper ballots that were treated like provisional ballots.

Georgia Southern students who work on voter mobilization fear that the daunting experience - the challenges were coupled with warnings in the media about the consequences of voting illegally - may have left some student voters disillusioned. "I definitely think it’s going to deter students from voting in this town in the future," said Josh Garman, a Georgia Southern senior who worked on the drive.

Call it a lesson in "vote caging."

That’s the term voting rights activists use when a party or other political organization challenges the eligibility of registered voters en masse, with little or no regard for the eligibility of any specific voter.

A new bill proposed by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) seeks to limit the practice by requiring anyone who challenges the eligibility of voters to present evidence disproving each individual voter’s eligibility - such as verifiable proof that a voter has moved or died - rather than making a blanket claim about the supposed ineligibility of a large group of voters.

Click here to read the full story.