Group accused of duping black voters
(credit: wvwv.org)
Are Clinton supporters trying to suppress black turnout?
What happened
A voter-registration group called Women’s Voices, Women’s Vote has been calling African-American voters in North Carolina suggesting they need to fill out new paperwork in order to vote, even though the registration deadline has passed for the state’s primary election. Black voters complained about the automated calls—from a man who identifies himself as “Lamont Williams” and never identifies on whose behalf he is calling—and the North Carolina–based Institute for Southern Studies traced the calls back to WVWV. (Wired) The institute’s Facing South blog said that WVWV, whose stated goal is to increase turnout among “unmarried women voters,” has also faced complaints over misleading tactics in at least 11 other states. WVWV has not endorsed any candidate, but has several prominent ties to Hillary or Bill Clinton. WVWV said the late calls were an “unfortunate coincidence.”
What the commentators said
This legally suspect "Nixon-style” effort to “dupe and disenfranchise” voters is “real sleaze,” said The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, not mere “Jeremiah Wright-style buffoonery.” And the signs all point to Clinton. If North Carolina were the only place this had happened, and if the Clinton campaign “hadn’t shown itself to be quite so sleazy” already, one might be “less suspicions.” But “something stinks” here—the group’s full house of “Washington insiders” wouldn’t allow “incompetence like this” to happen again and again.
The “pro-Clinton conspiracy” theory is a little “unconvincing,” said Ben Smith in Politico. The main evidence is that Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams used to be on the WVWV board, and the group is “staffed with other former Clinton types.” So why is reputedly “vigorous” Barack Obama supporter William McNary on its board, too?
I am, in fact, an Obama delegate, and yes, I am on the WVWV board, said William McNary in The Huffington Post. The group may have made “mistakes in this particular registration drive,” but “I can say with great conviction, there was no effort to suppress or confuse African-American voters.”
It still seems “kind of odd, doesn’t it?” said Steve Benen in The Carpetbagger Report blog. If the belated, misleading phone calls were, as the group says, “a big misunderstanding,” they were a “pretty dramatic one.” Besides, it seems like any “aboveboard voter registration effort” would start out its phone calls by identifying itself, instead of using “robo-calls” from “a made-up person” to falsely suggest the voter needs to do “additional paperwork before voting.”
