There is a hell of a lot of smoke being blasted up around this WVWV situation. The PR strategy here is confusion. I offer this as what I consider clarity. The linked news article is from February.

Sarah Johnson, communications director for the organization, said Friday that not including information about the source of the voter registration effort was "absolutely an accidental omission."

She said the group was changing its nationwide phone alerts to make clear who is coordinating the effort.

Its May. If this was a mistake, they would have cleared it up in nearly 3 months. It doesn't take THAT long to change out a recording in a mass calling machine. As far as I can tell at no point in this controversy have they specifically addressed why they did not change their recordings after they said they were going to.

This is not proof that they were deliberately engaged in voter suppression. There are three possibilities:

1. They were lying about this being a mistake. They were engaged in voter suppression.

2. They were lying about this being a mistake. They have found unidentified recordings to be more effective for some legitimate reason other than voter suppression. If they were lying, the problem that the general public has is that we have no reason to accept that their further insistences that they are not engaged in voter suppression are honest.

3. They are so incompetent that they managed to create a voter suppression scare, literally promise the general public that they were going to address the issue, did absolutely nothing, and created the exact same voter suppression scare again.

Door number 3 is the only option where I think we get to be comfortable with this organization, however, I'm not convinced that it's credible that these experienced "professionals" are that incompetent. I can't think of a place where I've ever worked where if I made a mistake that caused the Virginia Police Department to issue a public advisory upper management would not have been directly involved. People just don't get caught up in problems like that and then blow it off and not do anything. Thats the sort of problem that people tend to take very seriously.

Virginia voter registration effort proves legit after fears of scam | HamptonRoads.com | PilotOnline.com