Women’s Voices, Women Vote, an organization that does first-rate work to register unmarried women and African American voters, has recently been wrongly accused of engaging in voter suppression.

The reality is the opposite. In just the past six months, WVWV has submitted 400,000 voter registration applications. About 1/3 of these are minority voters. In North Carolina, from February until the primary registration deadline it helped 26,000 people register to vote. The majority of these voters are African American. It is because of WVWV’s work that they are able to vote in the primary.

Could WVWV have stopped its registration efforts once it was too late to register to vote by mail for the general election? Yes. But the Department of Motor Vehicles and public assistance agencies routinely continue registration during this period as do many voter registration organizations. The result is that thousands of people who would otherwise not get registered at all are at least able to vote in the general election.

Given the heightened interest in this year’s primary, and North Carolina’s new procedures for registration at early voting, it would have been better if WVWV had been willing to pause its efforts and settle for registering fewer voters, or had shifted to a different registration strategy. That doesn’t mean they had bad intentions, or that their net effect on minority turnout in the primary was negative, or even that they were sloppy. It means that they overlooked how the special North Carolina circumstances this year would interact with their standard gameplan.

The right-wingers who mastermind the real voter suppression efforts must be doing high-fives as they watch progressives attack a progressive organization that plays such an important role in registering voters. When an ally slips, we should reach out a hand to help them up – not kick them when they’re down.

All of us who represent and fight for poor and working people should congratulate Women’s Voices Women Vote for the great work it has done over the last several years, and put the misunderstanding about its North Carolina efforts behind us.