Lost Homes, Lost Votes: Are Republicans Trying to Block Foreclosed Homeowners from Voting in Michigan?

The Democratic National Committee and the Obama campaign have filed a federal lawsuit to block a controversial voter suppression tactic in Michigan. The Michigan Messenger reported this week that the chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of a Republican effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

JUAN GONZALEZ: The Democratic National Committee and the Obama campaign have filed a federal lawsuit to block a controversial voter suppression tactic in Michigan. The Michigan Messenger reported this week that the chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of a Republican effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

The Republican plan to challenge voters who have defaulted on their house payments is likely to disproportionately affect African Americans, who are overwhelmingly Democratic voters. In Michigan, more than 60 percent of all subprime loans were made to African Americans.

In the article, Macomb County Republican Party Chairman James Carabelli is quoted as saying, “We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses.”

AMY GOODMAN: But two days after the story broke, the Michigan Republican Party demanded a retraction. Carabelli contends the quotes were fabricated. In a press release, he writes, “Let me state, again and unequivocally, there is no such plan to use foreclosure lists to challenger voters, and I never said there was. This is a story line being pushed by one liberal blog, the Obama campaign, and their friends and operatives on the left,” he wrote.

The reporter who wrote the article and the website that published it, The Michigan Messenger, are standing by the story and are not printing a retraction.

Jeff Morley is the national editorial director of the Center for Independent Media, which sponsors a network of online websites, including The Michigan Messenger. He joins us from Washington, D.C. We also invited the Michigan Republican Party on Democracy Now!, but they declined our invitation.

Jeff Morley, welcome to Democracy Now!

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Why don’t you lay out what this story is?

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Our reporter, Eartha Melzer, has been looking into all issues around, you know, what’s going to happen on Election Day. And given the history of what happened in Ohio in 2004, we were especially interested in deliberate efforts to confuse voters, to disqualify people on technicalities, and we started calling around to the Republican Party and asking them about their so-called Voter Integrity program.

We didn’t get a lot of response from the Republican leadership on that, so we started calling—Eartha started calling state and local officials, and in the course of making these calls, she spoke with Mr. Carabelli. I know that the party has, you know, denied that this happened, but Eartha is an award-winning journalist. We have her time-stamped notes. We stand by the story 100 percent. He said that that was their plan.

JUAN GONZALEZ: When you say he denied this happening, he didn’t deny the conversation, he just denied the content of the conversation.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: No, and he knows that the conversation happened, and he knows that he talked about the use of foreclosure lists. You know, the bigger picture here is about how close this election is going to be, and will the Republicans be able to hold down turnout, and will the Democrats be able to drive it up. And so, at the margins, both parties are struggling for advantage here, and we know what the Republican tactics typically are here. And in her reporting for Michigan Messenger, Eartha Melzer talked to the lawyer for the Michigan Republican Party, Eric Doster, and he acknowledged that they’re going to be using a variety of tactics to seek to disqualify people. So it’s not really surprising that they would say this and that they’re planning on doing it. I take their denials that they’re going to use foreclosure lists at face value, but we will be checking to make sure that that’s true.

The other thing about the big picture here is, and one reason why I was, as an editor, urging Eartha to get on this story, was John McCain’s landlord in Michigan is a law firm called Trott & Trott. They are the biggest law firm in the state handling foreclosures. David Trott, the head of the firm, is a major bundler for the McCain campaign. So, it made sense to me. It made sense to me that they would be using foreclosure lists. This is sort of built into the infrastructure of the McCain campaign in Michigan.

And one more thing, this charge that we’re in league with the Obama campaign, it’s silly. We had no contact with the Obama campaign before this. This is something that we are looking at across our network. The Center for Independent Media has websites in five states and Washington, D.C., and we’re looking at Election Day issues in all of those states. In New Mexico, our site there, New Mexico Independent, has been looking carefully at: is New Mexico ready for Election Day? In Colorado, we’ve been looking at the Secretary of State there, where the Republican incumbent Mike Coffman is running for Congress. These are natural things that journalists are going to be looking into. There’s a front-page story in the Washington Post today about the growing awareness that there’s going to be problems on Election Day. This is a natural issue everybody should be looking at.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And in Michigan, a challenge, presumably, on Election Day to a person’s status, what would be the procedure for people to respond to that challenge at the voting booth or in the polling places?

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Well, if you are challenged, if you are challenged, you have the right to submit a—in Michigan, it was originally called an affidavit ballot. Under the Help America Vote Act, it’s now called a provisional ballot, in which your vote is challenged—you get to vote anyway—and then, once it’s decided whether you were eligible or not, then your vote, you know, will be counted. So, there are procedures in place for making sure that people are able to vote, even if they are challenged.

But, you know, when we started doing this, reporting this story for Michigan Messenger, the first story that we did was about a directive that the Secretary of State issued last December, which enabled vote challengers to challenge people’s voter IDs, their photo IDs that they will have to present. This was a new area of allowable challenge. And when various groups began to press the Secretary of State for explanation of how this procedure would work, the Secretary of State really clammed up and wouldn’t respond to requests for information, for background information. And so, we saw a level of a lack of transparency there. And that’s what really motivated us to really try and understand what is going on with these Election Day procedures, because, as we saw in Ohio in 2004, the ability to create long lines will discourage voters, and it will discourage turnout. If you go and see a five-hour-long line, a lot of people are just going to give up. So it’s going to—in a very close election, what happens at the polling place is actually going to be very important.