Voter Suppression in North Carolina

While the mainstream media has been focused on the all-important issue of what Obama's ex-minister has said, a group of Washington insiders with ties to the Clinton campaign have been causing illegal robo-calls to be placed to North Carolina residents in an effort to sow confusion and suppress turnout among likely Obama voters.

The calls have been placed to registered North Carolina voters--the key word here being registered, meaning that they don't have to do anything more than show up to vote on election day.  Here's what the calls said:

“Hello, this is Lamont Williams. In the next few days, you will receive a voter registration packet in the mail. All you need to do is sign it, date it and return your application. Then you will be able to vote and make your voice heard. Please return the voter registration form when it arrives. Thank you.”

There's an audio link here.

A logical reaction to receiving a call like that would be something like, "Oh crap, I thought I was registered, but I guess I'm not."  But in fact, the deadline to register to vote in the May 6 Democratic primary in North Carolina has already passed.  So the calls attempt to cause two voter-suppressing reactions: 1) to make registered voters believe that they are not, in fact, registered so there's no point in showing up on Tuesday, and 2) to further discourage these supposedly unregistered voters from verifying their registration status by placing the calls after the registration deadline had passed.

As Peter Overby of NPR points out,

This sounds like a classic example of voter suppression — sowing confusion in order to drive down turn-out. The calls seemed to be aimed at African-American communities, places where Illinois Sen. Barack Obama is expected to run well ahead of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton.

The voice of "Lamont Williams" in the robocalls is that of a male with an African-American accent--surprise, surprise.  The calls come from a blocked number.  As Chris Kromm of Facing South notes,

The calls are also probably illegal. Farmer and others have told Facing South the calls use a blocked phone number and provided no contact information -- a violation of North Carolina rules regulating "robo-calls" (N.C. General Statute 163-104(b)(1)c). N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper further stated in a recent memo that the identifying information must be clear enough to allow the recipient to "complain or seek redress" -- something not included in the calls.

It is also a Class I felony in North Carolina "to misrepresent the law to the public through mass mailing or any other means of communication where the intent and the effect is to intimidate or discourage potential voters from exercising their lawful right to vote."

The calls have been denounced by the N.C. State Board of Elections, as well as by voter advocacy groups including Democracy North Carolina, which called them "another in a long line of deceptive practices used in North Carolina and elsewhere that particularly target African-American voters."

An organization called Women's Voices. Women Vote is behind the calls.  This supposedly nonprofit and nonpartisan organization has extensive ties to Hillary Clinton and her campaign:

Some have also questioned the ties between Women’s Voices operatives and Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton. Gardner, for example, contributed $2,500 to Clinton’s HILLPAC on May 4, 2006, and in March 2005 she donated a total of $4,200 to Clinton, according to The Center for Responsive Politics’ OpenSecrets.org. She has not contributed to the Obama campaign, according to the database.

Women’s Voices Executive Director Joe Goode worked for Bill Clinton’s election campaign in 1992 as a pollster; the group’s website says he was intimately involved in “development and implementation of all polling and focus groups done for the presidential primary and general election campaigns” for Clinton.

Women’s Voices board member John Podesta, former Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton, donated $2,300 to Hillary Clinton on April 19, 2007, according to OpenSecrets.org. Podesta also donated $1,000 to Barack Obama in July 2004, but that was well before Obama announced his candidacy for president.

While ostensibly a nonprofit group, WVWV's goals (apart from getting Hillary Clinton elected President) are apparently the enrichment of its board members:

Charity watchdogs say the way the group Women's Voices Women Vote has spent its money on at least one contract raises red flags.

In 2006, the organization paid Integral Resources Inc. nearly $800,000 for phone services. That company's CEO and founder is Ron Rosenblith, who is married to Women's Voices president, Page Gardner. The contract represents 16 percent of the nonprofit's budget. The group is funded mostly through foundations and individual donations.

"I think it's a really big concern," said Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy in Chicago. "It does give an appearance of a conflict of interest."

The question, he and other charity experts say, would be whether Integral Resources profited from its inside connections. Women's Voices did not make anyone available to comment.

The organization also paid several million dollars more on contracts with companies run by five additional members of the nonprofit's leadership team.

This would be troubling if those people had influence over the nonprofit's expenditures when the contracts were awarded, said Rick Cohen, former executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, now national correspondent for Nonprofit Quarterly magazine.

"By going to companies that are related to members of the organization, it does create the image, if not the reality, of self-dealing," Cohen said of the Women's Voices contracts. "I think this is a concern for donors, a concern for state and federal regulators, and a concern to the public."

Surely this is a matter far more important to the functioning of democracy than off-the-wall remarks by Barack Obama's ex-minister.  Election laws have been violated by a financially self-interested group of Clinton insiders, who now claim that the whole thing was just a mistake that will not happen again.  But as Adam B. notes on Kos, this is a mistake that WVWV keeps making over and over:

Over and over again, voters and officials in states like Virginia, Oregon, Wisconsin and Michigan complained that these calls were going on (a) at times likely to provoke voter confusion as to their registration status and (b) without disclosing their source.  And still, WVWV did it again in North Carolina.  [The anonymous calls are particularly troubling, given WVWV's pledge months ago to identify themselves on all calls.]

Other than NPR, the mainstream media are ignoring this story.  Hey, it's complicated, it doesn't have the good visuals and soundbites that Reverend Wright so thoughtfully provided, so why bother, right?

I suggest taking concerns over these illegal attempts at voter suppression to the organization responsible for them.  Women's Voices Women Vote can be reached at 202-659-9570.  Their fax number is 202-833-4362.  Their e-mail address is info@wvwv.org.  Ask them how they can justify their tax exempt status when they spend so much of their money on businesses owned by their leaders.  Ask them why they called registered voters in North Carolina and suggested that they weren't yet registered.  Ask them why those calls went disproportionately to the areas where Obama is expected to do well.

I think we know the answers, but perhaps asking these questions is the first step to holding this un-American, un-Democratic group to account.