But for what?
At the Bush headquarters in Florida's capital, Campaign Director Doster agreed to an interview. But when BBC required me to disclose we had his "caging" e-mails, Doster fled like a bunny into his Tallahassee offices and sent out his mouthpiece, Mindy Tucker Fletcher, clutching a supersized cup of Coca-Cola as big as a mortar shell. She brought a flunky to nod at whatever she said, and a sneering list of explanations, beginning with a corker: the "caging" lists, she said, were a compilation of Republican donors.
Really? Including these folks? Here were the Bush-Cheney "donors" who all lived at the State Street Rescue Mission:
Page after page of names contained residents of homeless shelters.
Want to try again, Mrs. Tucker Fletcher?
A "caging list," she explained, was a term of art in the junk mail business referring to returned letters. I knew that. The Republicans, she said, didn't want to send duplicates to wrong addresses.
You don't say! So Mindy, you're telling me that Karl Rove's top attack dog is now running the mailroom via confidential messages to state party chairmen -- for address corrections?
Why don't I give you one more try, Mrs. Tucker Fletcher. Could these, by chance, be lists used to systematically challenge the registrations of voters of color?
Mindy Tucker Fletcher grinned and said, carefully, "This is not a challenge list. That's not what it's SET UP to do." Bingo.
You see, we'd already made a couple of visits to experts before stopping by Fortress Bush. After sending the lists to America's junk mail king Mark Swedlund, who'd helped me on many an undercover investigation, I had a damn good idea what these were -- an opinion confirmed, without prompting, by Ion Sancho, Florida's county elections supervisor, the recognized expert on voting systems -- and vote heists. "They couldn't be anything but challenge lists. And if they are, they're breaking the law."
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