We’re continuing to dig into what’s going on with Women’s Voices, Women Vote, the DC non-profit behind those suspicious robocalls in North Carolina. We’ve looked into the group’s activities in other states and at least outside of North Carolina it’s really difficult to figure out whether the group was up to no good or just mind-numbingly incompetent. Purportedly, WVWV’s aim was to register unmarried women. But in state after state (Virginia, Arizona, Colorado, Wisconsin, et al.) the group’s mailings spurred investigations or rebukes from state election authorities for sending people registration forms after the deadlines, or sending mailings that suggested recipients were legally required to return them signed, to just freaking people out. (For more details, see Facing South, which pulled all this information together.)
That’s not a good record. And secretaries of state offices in states around the country seem to have been complaining for months. But in these other states at least it’s not clear that WVWV is guilty of anything more than really heavy-handed mailers trying to sign up unmarried female voters, even if the recipients were sometimes married.
Setting aside the incidents in North Carolina, that we’re still looking into, it seems like in the rest of the country the group was involved in legitimate voter-registration efforts for a targeted group even though they went about it in heavy-handed way and sometimes confused voters by failing to note key registration deadlines.
Late Update: Mike Lux, who’s on the group’s board, vouches for the group and Page Gardner, who runs the operation.
Even Later Update: Seems the group flubbed the deadline in Oregon too.
