Republicans' Lost E-Mails Are Satirical Website's Gain

That is how the world learned this week of a so-called "caging" list consisting largely of African American voters in Florida, who critics say were likely targets of GOP voter challenges.

The e-mails were sent to georgewbush.org instead of georgewbush.com. The satirical georgewbush.org pokes fun at the president -- and is displaying many of those e-mails.

Posted on the website now is material related to the campaign's battleground state strategy, fretting over Democratic candidate John F. Kerry's gains on the stem cell issue, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's scripts for automated calls to Spanish-speaking voters encouraging early voting -- even discussion by one of presidential daughter Barbara Bush's admirers, who was advised by one correspondent to "stay away from [twin sister] Jenna or things could get ugly."

The website's owner, John Wooden, said he only discovered in the last two weeks that the site had been collecting the errant e-mails. The e-mails can be found by clicking on the link for the "Dead Letter Office."

One GOP official in Washington state openly worried about whether a county party organization had violated federal campaign laws by running an ad for Bush in its newsletter.

"God help us if the Democrats find out," wrote Ardean A. Anvik, a state committee man from Mason County.

On Kerry's apparent success in scoring points over embryonic stem cell research, one Republican wrote to campaign advisor Mary Matalin in early October: "Can't we say something intelligent? Can't Bush announce something progressive like dedicating even more federal funds to stem cells and other, more advanced areas such as cord blood?

It was another set of misdirected e-mails that tipped off the British Broadcasting Corp. to a list GOP researchers prepared of more than 1,800 presumably Democratic voters in Jacksonville, Fla.

The publishers of georgewbush.org sent that e-mail -- complete with voter names -- to a BBC reporter about 10 days ago, said Wooden, the Brooklyn-based Web designer who created the site and posted the e-mails.

"I was as surprised as anyone," said Wooden, who bought the domain name a year ago for $1,000 and has since built a site that closely resembles the campaign's official site.