I can appreciate the difficulties in managing a national Voter Registration (VR) campaign. I once managed a California VR campaign that registered over 200,000 voters, and the logistics were monumental, even with just one set of state VR rules. That said, the problems faced by the organization responsible for the North Carolina robo-call operation defies explanation. The reportage by Facing South in uncovering this organization (Women's Voices -- Women Vote) has been nothing short of exceptional.
To begin, voter registration professionals take their responsibilities VERY seriously. The obligation that is assumed by voter registrars is akin to the fiduciary obligation taken on by financial planners -- voting is sacred and you can't screw it up. When registrars take on the responsibility to register voters, like a doctor, the first responsibility is to "Do no harm."
I find it inconceivable that an organization that has successfully registered so many other voters in other campaigns could have so monumentally screwed this up. See my nagging and unanswered questions AND AN UPDATE after the jump:
UPDATE: I've read a couple other diaries with explanations for WVWV's tactics.
- WVWV says: "They also register AA & Hispanics," but today their spokesman had no idea why "Lamont Williams" was making the calls in NC? This was a big and expensive operation & their spokesperson didn't know who the target was? It seems unlikely.
- WVWV says: "VR often happens right after primaries because signups spike then." Sure, but then make the phone calls & send the mailing AFTER the primary, not in the gap between the mail-in registration deadline & the election, discouraging registered voters from voting & diverting unregistered voters from taking advantage of same-day registration/early voting opportunities.
Here are my unanswered questions about this operation:
- WVWV is extremely well funded and is staffed by political pros who follow politics. When the North Carolina problems erupted, why didn't WVWV come forward and take responsibility? Why did they have to be outed by Facing South? Assuming they knew (like I did by reading the news) of the chaos going on in North Carolina, if what was going on was a straight up VR campaign then why did they continue operating covertly after it went bad? The same question applies when problems erupted with WVWV campaigns in other states. Was WVWV simply unaware that they were creating havoc across the country? I find that VERY hard to believe.
- What's with the blocked caller I.D. & no identification of the organization in the robo-calls? Oops? Unlikely. This is a 501c3, and as such they are always looking for visibility, because visibility translates into support and funding. As Page Gardner's appearances on Youtube demonstrate, she knows she's in the visibility business. It is unthinkable that WVWV would run Robo-Calls (which are very expensive) without identifying themselves, unless they didn't want to be identified. Frankly, I've never seen a VR organization that didn't want to take credit for its activities. The only reason I can think of for why they wouldn't want to be identified is if they had something to hide.
- What's with all the legal screwups? The language of the calls neglects to inform voters of other ways they can register (like one-stop registration/voting), and the calls themselves were illegal due to the lack of organizational identification. VR is a legal intensive business. In all states that I know of, it's a crime to make claims that you're registering voters and then screw it up (intentionally or otherwise). Consequently, lawyers are ALWAYS involved in reviewing literature, making sure claims are accurate, that claims are complete, that deadlines are being met, and otherwise ensuring that in all ways the group conducting the VR campaign is avoiding legal liabilities. ...and with inevitable legal reviews, the idea that WVWV didn't know full well that they were stepping all over the primary election registration deadline in North Carolina is laughable. Again, this organization is run by political pros. Either their lawyers committed malpractice, or their lawyers were complicit in voter supression, or they didn't have a legal review because they knew they were involved in activities that wouldn't pass muster, or they are the most incompetent VR campaign in the history of multi-million dollar VR campaigns.
- What's with "Lamont" being the James Earl Jones-like "voice" to encourage single women to vote? This doesn't even pass the giggle test. Julia Louis-Dreyfuss is their public spokesperson, but "Lamont Williams" is the voice of this campaign to register single women? Other than Tyrone, I doubt that I could think of a name that is more prototypically AA than Lamont. I will be fascinated when others examine the call lists of WVWV to see exactly what, if anything, these specific call lists had to do with registering single women.
- As noted above, why the repeated (in several states) timing of the calls & mailers to conflict with primary election registration deadlines, if not to deliberately cause confusion and suppress the vote by encouraging people to think they weren't registered to vote?
- The Julia Louis-Dreyfuss ad & the Executive Director's CNN interview (on YouTube) leave little doubt that this group is very sympathetic to the Hillary Clinton campaign.
- Many of the staff/counsel for this group seem to have extensive connections to previous Clinton campaign/polling/war room operations.
Several posters on Huffington Post and DailyKos are vouching for WVWV, claiming that "This organization is real!!! They register real voters!!!" But I don't see why that can't be true, simultaneous to the fact that the organization might ALSO have been hijacked as a front for plausibly deniable black-ops voter supression efforts.
In sum, it seems to me that at best this organization has been criminally negligent, and at worst they've simply been criminal.
Having run large scale VR programs myself, I find it inconceivable that WVWV could apparently run some VR programs quite well, and others (like the VA and NC robo-call fiascos) in such catastrophically disasterous ways. Especially as I watch what some of HRC's 527s are capable of, I just don't buy that this was an unfortunately timed, incompetent VR effort that just coincidentally has the effect of suppressing voters who are disproportiontely likely to support Obama.
As my father used to say: If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck.... Somebody's probably getting ducked.