Intellectual Property Law

The Washington, DC non-profit group Women's Voices, Women Vote says that more than half of the North Carolinians it helped to register to vote in the presidential primary between February and  April this year were African American.

"In February, March and early April of this year, WVWV registered 26,000 voters in North Carolina, approximately 57 percent of whom are African American,"  the organization noted in a statement issued Monday. "No organization that would spend resources to register these voters would then turn around and attempt to disenfranchise them in May."

The group says that its mailings and automated phone calls, which featured an African-American male, and another female voice, went out to "all unmarried women -- white, African American and latina -- as well as to African American men and married African American and Latina women." 

The group has come under fire for the past two weeks for confusing voters in North Carolina because of its anonymous phone calls and voter registration mailings, some of which reached voters already registered to vote in the primary on Tuesday. Wired.com has been following the saga over the past few days.

The group's president Page Gardner, said that to clear up any further confusion, the group "went to Herculean efforts" to stop the mailings in states that still have upcoming primaries.   

The states are:

Kentucky -- Primary Day: May 20, 2008.
Montana -- Republican Presidential Preference Caucus: February  5, Democratic Primary: June 3, 2008 
North Carolina -- Primary Day: May 5, 2008
Oregon -- Primary Day: May 20, 2008
South Dakota -- Primary Day: June 3, 2008
West Virginia -- Republican Caucus: February 5, 2008, Democratic  Primary:  May 13, 2008.

"When the issue arose in North Carolina, we worked with the folks in that state, and we were able to pull the majority of our mail pieces," Gardner said in an interview. "We stopped the majority of the mail, and in the other states we asked our mail vendor to do the same."

Asked why the phone calls didn't include an identifying organization behind the calls, Gardner says: " Our transparency  came  through our piece in the mail."

"The calls were made to notify people. The application came right on the heels of the call, and the registration application had a clear source to it. It had a clear identity to it. When people got the mail, they knew who it was from in very short order."

Gardner sounded harried, and tired of the verbal beatings from bloggers and the negative media coverage that her group has received in the wake of the news about WVWV's anonymous robocall campaign.

Yet she was eager to defend her group's record and its use of databases to target voters to get them to register.

"People can flog to death what we did, but the most important thing is that we tried to be transparent throughout the mailing that we did. In the future, clearly there will be changes. At the end of the day this group has been about empowering and enfranchising people. If there's been a big sinkhole in the road we've admitted it, and acknowledged it in more statements than I can count.

Did we do everything perfectly? No. Do we try to get it right? Yes."

See Also:

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• Group Behind Misleading Robo-Calls to Voters Answers Some ...
• Washington, DC, Group Accused of High-Tech Dirty Tricks to ...