The NAACP is helping inmates in jails across the country get out — get out the vote, that is.
In its effort to boost voter registration and participation this election, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has targeted 18 states and Washington, D.C. with its mission to reach the votes of more than 15,000 inmates.
'Our role and goal was to register and deliver absentee ballots to those who are incarcerated and are eligible to still vote,' said Synamon Baldwin, NAACP Inmate Voter Coordinator.
The program is aimed primarily at people awaiting trial and those convicted of misdemeanors — in 29 states, felons are barred from voting.
One of those states is Alabama, where the state Attorney General blocked the NAACP's request that sheriffs either set up absentee voting booths in Alabama jails or accompany inmates to polling precincts.
'In Alabama, if you have been convicted of a felony, you are automatically disqualified from voting,' said Attorney General Bill Pryor, adding that non-felons in the state's jails won't be voting either. 'We just don't allow that under our election laws.'
Despite Alabama's resistance, the NAACP calls the inmate voter program 'a tremendous success for civil rights.' However, some critics charge the effort is not targeted at civil rights but at influencing close elections by boosting Democratic turn-out.
The NAACP paid for a television ad criticizing Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush for refusing to sign hate-crime legislation in Texas. The ad features the daughter of James Byrd, an African American man who was tethered to a truck and dragged to his death in Texas. His killers are now on Texas' death row.
'Gov. George Bush didn't sign the hate crime bill, and it's like my father's getting killed all over again,' Byrd's daughter says in the ad.
But the non-profit NAACP dismisses the suggestion the prison voter registration initiative is politically motivated.
'This registration was not just for the election,' Baldwin said. 'We register people all year, every day, all the time. We don't promote any candidate or any party. We're non-partisian, plain and simple.'
Regardless of the NAACP's motivation, analysts say that with so many races neck-in neck this year, their goal to produce 15,000 inmate voters could change results.
'There was one election in 1994 in Connecticut for the House that I think was decided by 8 votes, so I think if you have a concentration of those inmates in one contested tight state, it could make the difference,' said Mike Frank of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.