Facing South
Anchored by Chris Kromm,
Facing South is the blog of the Institute for Southern Studies. The
Institute, founded in 1970 and based in Durham, North Carolina, was longtime
publisher of Southern Exposure magazine. It still serves as an arsenal of
research and organizing guidance for progressive activists throughout the
South.
In late April 2008, Kromm and his blog were
first to report a developing scandal involving misleading robo-calls to
North Carolina voters that it traced to a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit,
Women's Voices Women Vote. First fingered by state residents as a potential
vote-suppression effort, the unattributed robo-calls implied that the
recipient was not registered to vote, indicating that they still had to
return voter registration materials in the mail. The voter registration
deadline, however, had already passed. Voters who responded to the mailing
might have rendered their registration status suspect. The program launched
just prior to a hotly contested state and presidential primary.
Complaints from confused and outraged voters and allegations of shoddy
targeting and impropriety have dogged the program in several other states.
Well after its expose, Facing South continued to research and report on the
story in an effort to distill the truth about the project, its aims, and its
implications for other nonpartisan voter-contact efforts.
