The voter suppression scandal involving Women's Voices Women Vote continued to grow yesterday, as the North Carolina NAACP filed a formal complaint of possible voter suppression against the group, which has deep ties to Hillary Clinton, for its deceptive and illegal robocalls and mailings in North Carolina. As reported by Facing South and the News & Observer, the NC NAACP hand-delivered its complaint to state Attorney General Roy Cooper and State Board of Elections Executive Director Gary Bartlett on Saturday. The NAACP said it is also alerting the U.S. Department of Justice that it is collecting more information from its national network and is contemplating filing a formal complaint with that agency. The NAACP's complaint is extensive and troubling, to say the least.
North Carolina NAACP President Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II announced the filing of the complaint at a press conference on Saturday outside the NC Department of Justice. He was joined by his group's attorney, Al McSurely, and Bob Hall of Democracy North Carolina. The state Attorney General's office is already investigating WVWV, but the NC NAACP and Democracy North Carolina want to be parties to that investigation.
You can read the full complaint on Facing South's website. The complaint notes that WVWV stated in an April 28, 2008, letter to Bartlett, the state's election chief, that it was about to mail voter registration information to 276,118 unmarried women in North Carolina and that it was sending similar mailings to "unmarried women not just in North Carolina, but around the country." But the complaint notes that three days later, on 1 May 2008, after Democracy North Carolina had raised the issue of possible targeting of African Americans, WVWV pulled a 180 and denied it only targeted unmarried women. In a written answer it said: "While our focus is on unmarried women, we have worked to target other under-represented groups through our project, the Voter Participation Center."
This is a key point regarding WVWV's activities that definitely requires further investigation. If you look throughout the organization's website, at all of its literature, videos, etc., all the group talks about is its focus on unmarried women. It says nothing about reaching out to African Americans or Latinos or other racial/ethnic groups. But if you go to the group's website today, right at the top of its homepage you'll see new copy that was added today to tout how "WVWV has registered over 400,000 unmarried women, African American and Latina voters this cycle." Overnight, it seems, a group that claims to have "one goal in mind: Improving unmarried women's participation in the electorate and policy process" has suddenly rewritten its mission and is now a group targeting not just unmarried women but African Americans and Latinos, both men and women, married or unmarried.
The rest of the complaint details some of WVWV's many offenses that the NC NAACP has documented to date. In a key point, the complaint notes a disturbing difference between the text of the robocall targeting women, which features the voice of a woman, and the text of the robocall targeting African Americans, which features the voice of "Lamont Williams," who the NAACP identifies in the complaint as an African American man. The call targeting African Americans is much longer than the call targeting women and implies in much more specific terms that the recipients of the call are not registered to vote:
Lamont's calls tell people that are registered that they are not and that the only way they can vote is to wait a few days, get a form in the mail, fill it out and mail it back in. As one commentator said, "Whether the result of deliberate design or massive negligence on the part of WVWV and/or its vendors in terms of the timing of the calls and the determination of who would be called, the end result is something which rightly raised suspicions about the intent of this program."
The complaint notes several errors and deceptions in the robocalls, many of which have already been documented on dkos, including:
- Contrary to North Carolina law, there was no identification of the organization who had paid for the call, WVWV, or its "project" organization, Voter Participation Center, nor did Lamont provide any way for the receivers of his misleading message to check on it, if they had questions.
- When Lamont's messages were sent to hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians on April 24th and 25th the deadline to register for the May 6 primary had passed if you tried to register by mail. You could easily register--and Vote! by going to a one stop early voting place.
Although much of the focus of WVWV's voter suppression efforts have focused on its robocalls, the NC NAACP's complaint also notes numerous errors and deceptions in the mailers sent out by WVWV in North Carolina, including the following:
- Some (mailings) say, "The deadline for voter registration is approaching," but the mail-in deadline has ended two weeks earlier.
- Some (mailings) say, "state law requires you to update your voter registration records," but voters who move within a county are allowed to vote without previously changing their registration.
The complaint notes that WVWV has said they have tried to delay the 276,000 pieces of mail destined for North Carolina and that "a majority of the mail that was going to North Carolina will not be delivered, and our folks are continuing to try to make sure that as much of the NC mail as possible is held until a later date." But based on conversations with WVWV's vendors and postal officials on Friday, the NC NAACP has concluded that approximately 110,000 pieces are still being delivered this week, most heavily in Eastern North Carolina.
The complaint also details a repeated pattern by WVWV of sending out Lamont-style robocalls in multiple states in a very specific - and suspicious - window of time: after the state's mail-in registration deadline has passed but before the state's primary date, including in Kentucky, North Carolina, Oregon, Virginia and West Virginia. In state after state, WVWV apologizes for errors and confusion, promises not to do it again, but then does the exact same thing in the next state:
WVWV said it "was a mistake" for Lamont not to identify the sponsoring organization and "we regret the error and will ensure it does not happen again." WVWV has repeatedly been challenged on the inaccurate and misleading mass robo-calls and mass mailings in other states, and it merely apologizes, and says they will do better in the future. Months ago, we understand, WVWV pledged to identify the source of Lamont's calls. This promise was broken.
In the News & Observer article, WVWV President Page Gardner continued this pattern. She "pledged" to review the NAACP's letter and - as WVWV has done for more than five months - once again explained away all of her group's problems as innocent errors:
"We will voluntarily respond to the allegations, but we firmly believe that [a state] investigation is unnecessary and any errors were inadvertent," Gardner said in a news release.
Hall of Democracy North Carolina told the newspaper that he remains skeptical of the motives of Women's Voices:
"Is [Women's Voices] massively incompetent or calculatingly devious?" Hall asked rhetorically.
Put me down as skeptical too.