Update: Virginia State Board of Elections Does Next to Nothing About the VPC

The Virginia State Board of Elections met today. They talked. And they took no action to investigate the Voter Participation Center.

After a two hour meeting, the State Board of Elections opted today not to take any action related to a group’s voter registration mailings that have led to several hundred complaints.

The board met this morning to discuss mailings from the Washington-based Voter Participation Center, many of which have been sent to already-registered voters and some ineligible to vote, including felons, the deceased, children, non-U.S. citizens and even family pets.

Weeks ago, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign asked the board to request an investigation into the matter by Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. But after hearing from more than a dozen speakers on both sides of the issue, no member of the board made such a motion.

The VPC did agree to the SBOE’s request that it stop sending out forms with some personal information already filled in. But without an investigation, the VPC will continue posing as non-partisan while sending out forms so confusing that even one member of the Virginia board that received a form was confused by it. Stopping the pre-population of data on the forms does at least make it more difficult for the VPC to pack voter rolls with fake voters, in one swing state.

My guess is that the board is afraid to investigate. They have heard from hundreds of Virginians who have had problems with the VPC’s forms, and the chaos the group creates pops up wherever the group operates. But the board’s members know that the VPC’s “non-partisan” allies will stir the pot, and accuse the board members of racism or whatever they can dream up, to turn the investigation into a circus. One of those allies is the NAACP, which is openly working with the VPC in Texas and historically is not above playing the race card whenever it suits them.

Some state needs to get to the bottom of what the Voter Participation Center is really up to, but no state, it seems, has the guts for that fight.