...for 7 years. His "Best Democracy Money Can Buy" book has the whole Katherine Harris / ChoicePoint etc. story laid out in full (and ChoicePoint had a role in the Mexican elections, too).

The secret is to subcontract out the job of "cleaning up" the voter rolls. There are no laws governing how the contractee arrives at the list. Matching Dem voters against military rolls (or any demographic that shows a decent chance they've moved without changing their voter registration) gets you a list of "suspect names". Hand these lists back over to Harris / Blackwell to send registered letters to. Voila, Dem voters excluded, no GOP voter touched.

Or match (nationwide) ex-felon lists against (statewide) Dem voters in a state where ex-felons can't vote. Purge them (no registered mail necessary) even if the name only partly matches. When they show up to vote, send them away or give them a provisional (disposable) ballot. Harris did this, even to people who moved to FL from states where ex-felons can vote, so FL was legally required to allow them to vote.

I live in one of the 2 states where (a) felons can still vote and (b) you can register to vote at the door on election day. All the others have some type of "ewww, we don't want those types voting" laws.

Democracy Now! - Investigative Journalist Greg Palast Reports on the Firing of New Mexico Attorney David Iglesias - Monday, May 14th, 2007

He talks about caging too:

GREG PALAST: Iglesias believes the real reasons for the firings are in what are called the missing emails, emails sent by the Rove team using Republican Party campaign computers, which Rove claims can't be retrieved. But not all the missing emails are missing. We have 500 of them. Apparently the Rove team misaddressed their emails, and late one night they all ended up in our inboxes in our offices in New York City.

And as Iglesias predicted, they reveal a story the party would rather keep buried. Voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., reviewed the evidence in our cache of emails and concluded:

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: They ought to be in jail for doing this, because they knew it was illegal, and they did it anyway.

GREG PALAST: What is it that was so obviously illegal that law professor Kennedy thought they deserved prison time? The evidence that shook him was attached to fifty of the secret emails, something that GOP party chiefs called caging lists, thousands of names of voters. Notably, the majority were African American. Kennedy explained how caging worked.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Caging is an illegal way of getting rid of black votes. You get a list of all the black voters. Then you send a letter to their homes. And if the person doesn't sign it at the homes, the letter then is returned to the Republican National Committee. They then direct the state attorney general, who is friendly to them, who’s Republican, to remove that voter from the list on the alleged basis that that voter does not live in the address that they designated as their address on the voting application form.

GREG PALAST: In all, the Republican Party challenged nearly three million voters, a mass attack on minority voting rights virtually unreported in the US press.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: So they disenfranchised millions of black voters who don't even know that they’ve been disenfranchised.

GREG PALAST: Page after page of voters with this address, Naval Air Station, Jacksonville, hundreds, thousands of soldiers and sailors targeted to lose their vote. Go to Baghdad, lose your vote.

And what does this have to do with the prosecutor firings? Take a look at the name at the top of the secret missing email: Tim Griffin. This is the man in charge of the allegedly illegal caging operation. He is research director for the Republican National Committee, special assistant to Karl Rove, and as of December 7 Karl Rove's personal pick for US attorney for the state of Arkansas. Is this a case of the perpetrator becomes the prosecutor? For Democracy Now! this is Greg Palast.