The cornerstone program of the National Coalition is Operation Big Vote, a nationwide nonpartisan, grassroots voter participation program. This program supports intensive voter education, registration and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) activities.
Even the shooed-aside Bill Clinton was allowed to pitch in on this, making trips to predominantly black districts and recording 70 different phone messages that were then piped into the homes of potential black voters.
All of this was supplemented by the NAACP’s get-out-the-vote effort, "Operation Big Vote," which was ostensibly nonpartisan but seen by many as a $9 million soft-money contribution to the Gore campaign. Paid staffers and volunteers scoured the country for black voters, targeting the unregistered in shopping malls, nightclubs, black churches, even southern prisons, where they harvested some 11,000. As the election approached, the NAACP’s army manned telephone banks and knocked on doors; messages urging blacks to get to the polls aired on BET and in Magic Johnson Theaters. All of this was pretty much business as usual-except on a new scale. What wasn’t so conventional were the NAACP’s widely aired "issue ads," which didn’t exactly say, but left little doubt about whom the organization thought blacks should vote for.
Not surprisingly, many St. Louis residents are angry that someone had registered them and knew information such as their Social Security numbers. Some of the people registered by the bogus cards told Election Board workers that someone calling himself "Big Mike" came to their homes and said he was with the Election Board and wanted to register them.
This is not the first time Operation Big Vote has been at the center of a voter registration controversy. In 1994, the director of Operation Big Vote was the subject of a similar investigation into fraudulent voter registration cards found among the 14,000 that the group had collected to aid a statewide campaign to allow riverboat casinos. No one was indicted.