Caging is the term applied to wholesale voter challenge activity, directed at discrete populations of voters, usually consisting of the poor, the minority or students.  Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, correctly identifying the abuses of "caging," has introduced a bill with federal controls.  It appears that this is very much, and sadly, a partisan issue, which it need not be.

     Politico, reporting on the bill, noted that no Republicans had co-sponsored it.  It found that the leadership of the College Republicans professed not to have heard of caging at all.  In Allison Hayward, however, the paper found a defender.  She argued the utility of partisan poll watchers, and she hailed the use of partisan challenge activity "as a protection against historically Democratic machines."

     Now Allison is highly knowledgeable about election law, and she is not reflexively partisan; but to which "machines" might she be referring here?  The use here of "historically" seems to operate as a hedge:  there is a hint here of past machinery, not what it once was but capable of regeneration if defenses are not maintained in place.  But, as Politico notes, caging has become a popular weapon against student voting, and it is not clear how, historically or otherwise, it could be said that "machines" rely on the production of the student vote.  Hayward might explain how a "machine" differs from an effective campus get-out-the-vote drive, and if the two are the same, why do we need "protection" against them?

     This is where the dangers of "caging" become clear—right there, in the defense offered by Allison.  Partisans identify the populations with strong allegiances on the other side—whether these are allegiances to party or primarily to the party’s ticket—and they use tactics like caging to discourage or limit the vote.  Stirring fears of the "machine" is rhetorical cover for fire directed against voters holding and typically voting on specific preferences. 

     By referring to "machine" activity, the voters are pictured as mere pawns in a disreputable power play by one party mobilizing a mindless horde or supporters, on illegal or unsavory terms.  Maybe the "machine" is stealing names and addresses, enabling illegal votes to be cast and making victims of these voters; or maybe the voters are dupes, just doing as instructed by the "machine" and selling out their vote for a promise of patronage or a pack of cigarettes.  Either way, the threat of the "machine," established by nothing more than the simple assertion of its existence, licenses suppressive activity for partisan ends.

     Now the most extreme instances of caging, conducted on the basest of motives, are not ones that Allison could be fairly or rightly accused of condoning.  This was not her purpose.  She did, however, make the case against Whitehouse’s bill, and for practices like caging, by describing the need for protections against "historically Democratic machines."  As an expert, her words won’t go unnoticed, and she might be asked, reasonably, for more explanation than the discussion in one brief news account will allow.  As an indefatigable writer and blogger, she will welcome the opportunity.

Bob Bauer