Kansas GOP Chair Sends Email Boasting of Voter Caging

Kris Kobach, a former counsel to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft who is currently the chairman of the Kansas GOP, sent out an email on Thur entitled “Kansas Republican Party Year in Review” in which he brags of voter caging. Blue Tide Rising has the goods:

… Kris Kobach, chairman of the Kansas GOP, sent out a self-congratulatory litany of accomplishments. Among them was one particularly eye-catching item:

"To date, the Kansas GOP has identified and caged more voters in the last 11 months than the previous two years!" […]

Slate.com has the best comprehensive write-up on how the Republican Party employs caging techniques to suppress the votes of the poor, the deployed, and college students. (You know, likely Democratic voters.)

Did we mention it’s illegal? And that Kris Kobach is proud to be doing it?

Since Kris Kobach can’t expand his own party or force his own Party’s members to support his candidates he’s shamelessly trying to keep Democrats from voting instead. This is the stratagem of a desperate and shrinking party.

Someone needs to ask Kris Kobach which voters he’s caging and how he’s doing it. Someone like a newspaper editor or perhaps a Grand Jury. … (more)

More on Kris Kobach here and here (He apparently suffers from an advanced case of Lou Dobb's disease). Depending on what methods are being used in Kobach’s admitted voter caging scheme, it may very well be illegal, but hardly surprising. Voter suppression through caging lists has become a standard part of the Republican playbook to steal elections for some time now. In Sept McClatchy detailed current Republican voter caging efforts underway in Florida and Ohio to “impede Democratic-leaning minorities from voting in 2008,” and back in July PBS NOW took a look at the Republican Party’s voter caging plan “designed to keep Democrats from voting, allegedly by targeting people based on their race and ethnicity.” Watch that video here.

Late Update: This post really took off. After I helped shine a light on it by posting it over at C&L, it got picked up by several other of the more notable blogs including HuffPo and DailyKos, was all over Air America for a day or two (especially Thom Hartmann), then was picked up by the KC Star political blog, the Lawrence Journal, then the AP. As Blue tide Rising says now: "Kris Kobach is famous"