COVER UP! WVWV's disinformation campaign hits Salon.com! [now with poll]
Fri May 02, 2008 at 08:19:42 PM PDT
It is clear now that WVWV is engaging in a disinformation campaign to try to steer concerned people away from the idea that they're engaging in voter suppression among African Americans in North Carolina. They have been using surrogates such as pro-Obama board members Mike Lux and William McNary, not to mention independent voter registration activists like James Rucker of ColorOfChange.org and Becky Bond of Credo Mobile/Active Matters to vouch for their character and steer us away from suspecting WVWV of anything untoward.
Today, their latest victim is Salon.com's Alex Koppelman.
Details below the fold.
I have spent a good deal of energy over the past few days looking into the WVWV situation, and the more I learn, the clearer it is that something ain't right. I plan to do an extended diary on Sunday about how a little newspaper in Craig, Colorado, got caught up in their cover up. I will also do a diary soon about my conversation with the Colorado Secretary of State's office, which confirmed to me today that WVWV, despite its claims that they use "a sophisticated matching process that compares a consumer data file with the Colorado file of registered voters," in fact did NOT use the Colorado voter file from the Secretary of State's office, resulting in many thousands of already registered voters in that state being mailed forms that led them to believe that they had to re-register.
I will also call people's attention to a comment by Durham, NC, County Democratic Party Chair Kevin Farmer (who received a robocall at his bakery and helped bring attention to the issue) that the bakery's phone number WVWV robocalled is listed the Democratic Party's "votebuilder" database as belonging to an African American male (Kevin is white).
But for now, I want people to know what's up with the Salon.com article. Even after they started referring questions about the North Carolina Attorney General's investigation to their lawyer (due to the NC Attorney General's investigation), they had an unnamed spokesperson feeding misleading information to the progressive online magazine.
There are lots and lots of fallacies and inconsistencies in this article - it would take me days to point them all out. Hopefully commenters will help. But I want to focus on a few of the big ones right here.
- There's no mention of the fact that spokesman Sarah Johnson told the Virginia-Pilot in February that they would no longer put out anonymous robocalls. All Koppelman says is that problems were reported in many states. Alex also never addresses the fact that in the Pilot article, Sarah Johnson is quoted as saying "that of all the states where the effort is under way, Virginia was the only one where there had been reports of problems." This despite press releases NOVEMBER in from the Colorado and Arizona secretaries of state criticizing the many, many problems with the mailings they were doing in those states. Moreoever, it doesn't point out that in both of those states, WVWV is the ONLY organization in ANY of their press releases going back YEARS that is singled out for it's odd voter registration mailings. [For what it's worth, I talked today to the Colorado SOS press guy, who confirmed to me that WVWV's executive director, Joe Goode, has yet to return any calls - placed in November by the Elections Director and Deputy Elections Director - to the WVWV office.]
- Koppelman did not ask or contemplate whether WVWV would or could do anything to rectify the situation before the primary on Tuesday.
- Here's the kicker. Koppelman's article mentions nothing about a second call targeting women. If you'll remember, in her response to Adam B's questions, posted at DailyKos yesterday, Sarah Johnson stated quite clearly that the Lamont Williams calls went to men, while another (unnamed) female call went to women. [Note: we still haven't heard any complaints about that call, the name of the woman on the call, or the actual audio of the call.] Yet in Koppelman's article, he quite upfront states the following:
Last Thursday and Friday, North Carolinians received the following message:
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 fill it out, sign it, date 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.
In all, that robo-call was made 182,236 times.
Where did Koppolman get the "182,236" figure? I haven't seen it anywhere. In fact, if you do a Google search for "182,236" and "WVWV" or "182,236" and "North Carolina," the only article comes up is from salon.com. That number had to have come directly from WVWV's anonymous spokesman. And yet, Koppelman makes no mention of a second, female caller, which was used by Johnson to dispel the notion that a black man was being used to contact their target female voters.
- Koppelman quotes a letter dated and supposedly mailed on April 24 from Page Gardner to the NC State Board of Elections, which conveniently quells any and all confusion regarding the "unfortunate" timing of their mailing. [It's perhaps noteworthy that as of the end of the day on Wednesday, April 30, the Board of Elections had not received the letter, and in fact only knew about it because it was faxed to them late Monday afternoon, April 28.] Koppelman makes special note of it, and it is in fact the linchpin of the argument to dispel any suspicions about the timing of the robocalls:
Those who've suggested there was voter suppression at work often started their coverage from the assumption that the calls were directed at the primary. In fact, the calls were part of a campaign aimed at 24 states in total, and they were intended to boost voter registration in general. The calls had nothing to do with the primary, and the registration deadline the group says it really cared about -- the one for the general election -- won't pass until this fall. Admittedly, the call itself did not specify this, and it should have. But even so, this still isn't an after-the-fact assertion by WVWV. The group had made its purpose clear even before the controversy began. In a letter Gardner sent April 24 to the executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, she explained the purpose of the mailings intended to follow the robo-calls and wrote, "Unfortunately, North Carolina residents will receive this mail after the deadline for registering to vote to participate in the upcoming primary election. Please be aware that the mailing is not intended to encourage registration specifically for the primary, but simply to encourage voter registration in general."
Koppelman neglects to point out that the letter makes no mention of the robocalls; nor does he point out that the letter hasn't yet been received via mail. He also fails to notice a key element of the letter. That letter talks about mailing to "276,118 women in North Carolina." Let me repeat that: women in North Carolina. It later states that their "efforts" are intended "to identify only unregistered unmarried women" although it acknowledges that it's an imperfect effort. It does mention the "Voter Participation Center," (which Sarah Johnson told Adam was "a project of WVWV [that] works to engage other under-represented Americans,") but does not say a thing about having mailed to non-women (aka men) or "under-represented Americans" under VPC or any other organization.
As mentioned, the letter to the NC Board of Elections says nothing about the robocalls that caused the massive confusion in the first place. It was accompanied by an UNDATED press release that WVWV emailed out to bloggers earlier this week, that very straightforwardly talks about the one-stop voting registration options that WVWV neglected to tell people about in their robocalls. (That press release is highly dubious, as it was picked up by exactly ZERO North Carolina media outlets, is undated, and doesn't appear on their website's list of press releases.) The press release similarly fails to mention robocalls.
But back to the women/men issue, why is WVWV giving Salon a different version of events than they gave Kos, which is still different from the letter they sent to the NC Board of Elections? In the letter, they mailed to women only; to Kos, they mailed and called to women and men using two different callers; and to Salon, they mailed and called, but appear only to have used the Lamont Williams call (not the mysterious female call that nobody seems to have heard). And, of course, they haven't answered a very obvious question of who they used for women who they knew were married (thus not in their WVWV target group) and black (and thus in their VPC "underrepresented" target group). Did Lamont call them, or the unnamed female? Amazing that they were able to give a specific number to salon.com for how many calls they made (182,236) but neglected to point out the extremely salient fact that supposedly there were two different callers!
There is far, far more wrong with both the salon.com article and the overall WVWV online disinformation campaign which, as promised, I will diary about on Sunday. It's just completely astounding to me that Koppelman bought the story hook, line, and sinker.
For the record, I have no direct evidence that these robocalls were part of a malicious strategy on the part of a few key WVWV people. At this point, I don't care much. What I do care about is how easily people are jumping to the defense of this extremely deficient, lazy, sloppy, inefficient, foundation-money-sucking half-ass organization and then, when confronted with basic questions about specifics, can't seem to answer one way or the other. It bothers me that Mike Lux, one of their board members, told me in a private email that the staff never informed him about the Colorado Secretary of State's press release castigating the group (he pushes it off as an "attack" from a "right wing" official), and yet he's putting up a blog post at Open Left, putting his credibility on the line for these people.
Mostly, I hate being lied to, either directly or indirectly.
To me, the cover up is, if not worse than the crime, pretty damn bad.
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