Women's Voices Women Vote UPDATE

This follow-up from Daily Kos: (ignore what look like links in the following, I'm too lazy to go through and manually remove them, but they're in the original linked above, if you want to go that far.)

The basic problem is this: when you call people who are registered to vote and give them the impression that they are not, then compound the error by making such calls at a time when there's nothing the voter can do about it, you're going to lead to a lot of registered voters who believe they're unable to vote. 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.

I understand that some have defended WVWV by arguing that post-primary deadline is actually the most successful time to register voters, but not when you're consistently confusing voters and angering state elections boards while doing so. Given the complaints, this should have been fixed or ended long before now.

Honestly, I don't think WVWV has gone far enough to fix the mess they've made. A press release and withholding some of the mailing isn't enough. I believe they're obligated to go through the list of every NC resident/residence they called and determine who is eligible to vote. They should explain to those voters that they were reached in error and should show up and vote on May 6. They should call back the unregistered voters and inform them that one-stop absentee registration and voting is still available until Saturday. And they should explain who they are, and how WVWV can be reached if there's any questions.

[When an Obama campaign vendor accidentally called thousands of Washington state voters with the wrong caucus date, they re-called all of them -- at their own expense.]

Big errors require big solutions, and I believe steps like these could confirm the good faith which so many of us had in WVWV's work.

I should mention that the North Carolina Attorney General is now investigating. Most interesting news out of this so far is that the executive director is married to the vendor that got more than $700,000 in business out of this outfit last year.