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Does it make sense that a group dedicated to registering women voters would purposely seek to disenfranchise them and keep them from the polls?

That seems a bit Orwellian to me. But that’s the allegation that the group Women’s Voices, Women Vote found itself confronted with in the weeks leading up to the recent North Carolina Democratic primary. For many months, Women’s Voices, Women Vote has been working on a campaign called “20 Million Reasons” — an effort to register 20 million single women who are eligible to vote, but not registered, because they are seen as a key demographic to winning the 2008 presidential race.

But some bad planning and a loose connection to the Clintons have cast a bad light on what ought to be seen as a great effort.

In North Carolina, even after the voter registration deadline had passed to allow voters to cast ballots in the just-ended May 5 North Carolina primary, WVWV continued to send out registration packets by mail and sposnored robo-calls to get more voters registered.

Would you call that an innocent attempt to keep registering people so they could vote next time around or a purposeful attempt to confuse voters and give the upper hand to Hillary Clinton? It depends on who you ask.

Perhaps in its zeal to register as many women as possible now, regardless of whether they would be able to vote in this round of presidential primaries, WVWV overlooked a law school basic — even if you’re not doing anything wrong, even the appearance of impropriety can get you into trouble.

According to an article in Wired Magazine by Sarah Lai Stirland, WVWV spent the months preceding the North Carolina primary registering about 26,000 women in that state to vote, raising the question — if Women’s Voices, Women Vote spent all that time and effort to get them registered, why would WVWV be trying to discourage them to actually vote?

But Arlene Fenton at Black Women Vote blog doesn’t seem convinced that this was an innocuous slip-up:

There were problems with timing and delivery of the messages. Lately, WVWV concentrated on registering Black unmarried females, by crafting messages that are tailor-made for our demographic, with some unfortunate results.

The brouhaha can be summed up by the NAACP’s talking points:

Calls made to white women were as follows: “Hi. Just a reminder. Your voter registration form is in the mail to you. Your voice counts and your vote [indecipherable]. Sign it, date it and send it in. Thanks!”

But the calls that went to African American women and men went something like this:

“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 your registration form when it arrives. Thank you.”

If this is true, the disparity is definitely a cause for concern. But it still doesn’t make any sense to me that a group would make a massive effort to register tens of thousands of people, and then try to wave them off. If the WVWV efforts were tailored to disenfranchise African-American voters, wouldn’t it just not make the effort to register them in the first place?

Open Left blog quotes an E-mail it received from Becky Bond of Credo Mobile about it’s past experiences with WVWV:

[T]here is always a spike in voter registration around primaries AFTER the registration deadline has passed. [T]his is the best time to register voters. [R]esearch confirms this. [A]round primaries people are reminded that they need to register in time for the general. WVWV has done a lot of research in this area. [T]hey know when people are most likely to register. [U]nfortunately, what makes sense in registering the largest aggregate number of voters for the general election at the lowest cost is having a confusing effect in the N.C. primary which is hotly contested and very charged.

Jenny at Fabulously Jinxed, however, is not giving the Clinton campaign the benefit of the doubt:

Well, well, well. What’s this? Clinton’s people are behind Women’s Voices Women’s Vote? Could it be that it’s the Clinton Campaign that is adopting Bush election strategies?

OF COURSE IT IS!

So who’s right? I’ll let the North Carolina Attorney General’s office work on that one. They say the robo-calls were illegal because they didn’t identify the sponsoring group, but haven’t ruled on whether there was any intent to suppress voter turnout.

For me, the more important question is what efforts are going on that we know traditionally do suppress votes — like the recent ruling by the Supreme Court on requiring voter ID’s at the polls or the failure of the government to do anything to address faulty voting systems since the 2000 Bush/Gore debacle.

And, why are so many of us so willing to see a conspiracy theory here? Perhaps I’m naive and Bill and Hillary Clinton were really steering a non-profit group for their own nefarious scheme to take back the White House. But I don’t think so.

Karl Rove on the other hand ….

Cross-posted from BlogHer, where PunditMom is a Contributing Editor for Politics & News.

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