As sure as the swallows return to Capistrano, Republican operatives are again engaged in highly suspect voter suppression campaigns. The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed.”

WHAT?! You heard right, they’re trying to block the very people who’ve been screwed over by the system from VOTING! And you thought they did away with landowner requirements for voting along with Jim Crow 50 years ago. Not only is this unconstitutional and illegal (see 15th Amendment or the Voting Rights Act of 1965), it’s bordering on downright evil and adds a whole new level to the political skeez and dirty tactics that we’re sure have only begun to play out during this election.

According to an article in The Michigan Messenger:

“State election rules allow parties to assign ‘election challengers’ to polls to monitor the election. In addition to observing the poll workers, these volunteers can challenge the eligibility of any voter provided they ‘have a good reason to believe’ that the person is not eligible to vote. One allowable reason is that the person is not a ‘true resident of the city or township.’ The Michigan Republicans’ planned use of foreclosure lists is apparently an attempt to challenge ineligible voters as not being ‘true residents.’”

The hypocrisy of this is amazing. Republicans refuse all attempts to regulate the financial industry claiming that free market is god. Then they intervene at taxpayers’ expense when it all blows up due to lack of regulation, and now they’re purging voter rolls because of home foreclosures they indirectly were responsible for. To be fair, Republicans did not sign the mortgages that were defaulted, but on the other hand, there can be no doubt that the housing crisis we’re currently in the midst of could not have been significantly mitigated by more responsible governmental oversight. Of course, it must be a coincidence that they trying to disenfranchise black voters; it’s not as if Barack Obama needs them in a very tight race in Michigan.

This tactic is likely to disproportionately affect African-Americans who are overwhelmingly Democratic voters. More than 60 percent of all sub-prime loans — the most likely kind of loan to go into default — were made to African-Americans in Michigan, according to a report issued last year by the state’s Department of Labor and Economic Growth.

Very efficient, which is probably why Carabelli isn’t the only Republican Party official to suggest the targeting of foreclosed voters. Ohio’s Doug Preisse, director of elections in Franklin County (around the city of Columbus) and the chair of the local GOP, told The Columbus Dispatch that he has not ruled out challenging voters before the election due to foreclosure-related address issues.

“At a minimum what you are seeing is a fairly comprehensive effort by the Republican Party, a systematic broad-based effort to put up obstacles for people to vote,” said J. Gerald Hebert, a former voting rights litigator for the U.S. Justice Department who now runs the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington D.C.-based public-interest law firm. “Nobody is contending that these people are not legally registered to vote.”

“When you are comprehensively challenging people to vote,” Hebert went on, “your goals are two-fold: One is you are trying to knock people out from casting ballots; the other is to create a slowdown that will discourage others,” who see a long line and realize they can’t afford to stay and wait.

In metropolitan areas like Detroit hard-hit by the crisis, challenging all voters registered to foreclosed homes could disrupt polling places. According to the site RealtyTrac, one in every 176 households in Wayne County, metropolitan Detroit, received a foreclosure filing during the month of July. In Macomb County, the figure was one in every 285–that’s 1,834 legitimate Michigan citizens. The Macomb County foreclosure rate puts it in the top three percent of all U.S. counties in the number of distressed homeowners.

“Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Kent and Genessee counties were — in that order — the counties with the most homeowners facing foreclosure, according to RealtyTrac. As of July, there were more than 62,000 foreclosure filings in the entire state”

Oh yeah, and it’s worth mentioning that McCain’s regional headquarters are housed in the office building of foreclosure specialists Trott & Trott. The firm’s founder, David A. Trott, has raised between $100,000 and $250,000 for the Republican nominee.

The fact that the GOP’s using a tactic to help John McCain’s campaign benefit from the foreclosures crisis is unreal. Anyone a lawyer out there? Go to Michigan, go to Cleveland. For all you others, visit the ACLU’s website and help those who have lost everything, at the very least, keep their right to vote.