The Koch brothers' group Americans for Prosperity is sending voter registration information to the people of North Carolina. These mailings, which claim to include an "official application form" are not only NOT official, they include misleading and blatantly incorrect information.
Voters receiving these mailings are given contradictory information about the registration schedule, return envelopes that are printed with a non-existent address and incorrect information on how to contact the state Board of Elections. If recipients have questions, they are told to refer them to the Secretary of State's elections division--a division that exists only in the imaginations of the Americans for Prosperity mastermind who created these mailings.
Joshua Lawson, a public information officer who actually does work for the North Carolina state Board of Elections spoke to the News & Observer pointing out that his office is not part of the Secretary of State's office and blamed the Koch sponsored mailing for causing "a lot of confusion for people in the state." Mr. Lawson said that his office never saw the mailings and were never asked to verify any of the information before the mailings were released.
When asked how many of these inaccurate mailings were sent out, a spokesperson for the Americans for Prosperity office in Raleigh refused to answer.
In North Carolina, it is a felony to intentionally mislead voters about voter registration, though at this point, no one has charged them with being anything more than incredibly incompetent.
If I were cynical, (pause for laughter here), I would go further than "incompetent" and say this was a purposeful act designed to appear to refute claims that Republicans are trying to discourage minority voters by closing polling locations in poor neighborhoods and by passing new I.D. laws, but whose true purpose is, in fact, to further frustrate North Carolina's Democratic voters in order to keep them away from the polls in November.
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