False robocall targets Biden voters ahead of N.H. primary

Joe Biden supporters in New Hampshire are crying foul after a number of New Hampshire voters received a message imitating the voice of the president and urging them not to vote in Tuesday’s primary.

“It’s important that you save your vote for the November election,” said the message, which was obtained by the Globe. “Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again. Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday.”

In keeping with the national Democratic effort to shift the start of the presidential nominating calendar to more diverse states, Biden did not place his name on the ballot in New Hampshire for the Jan. 23 primary. But supporters in the state have been urging Democratic voters to write in the president’s name anyway, to demonstrate his strength in the first-in-the-nation state whose four electoral votes could prove crucial in a general election matchup against former president Trump.

Kathy Sullivan, a former New Hampshire Democratic chairperson who is helping lead the Biden write-in effort, slammed the calls as “outright election interference” conducted by “anti-democratic forces” in a statement Monday morning.

“On Sunday evening, I was made aware of an attempt to disrupt the New Hampshire primary with disinformation. Multiple people have described receiving a phony voice message created through AI that mimics the voice of President Biden, in an attempt to suppress their participation in the upcoming New Hampshire primary,” Sullivan said in the statement. “These dirty tricks will not stop us from exercising our civic duty; instead they have only reinforced our resolve to write-in Joe Biden and stop Donald Trump on Tuesday.”

Sullivan told the Globe she heard from about a dozen people who called her number in an attempt to get off the call list.

New Hampshire has seen efforts in the past to disrupt elections using phone schemes; in 2002, Republicans jammed the phone lines of a get-out-thevote operation being used by Democrats.

But as far as the imitation of Biden’s voice, “this is a new one on me,” Sullivan said Monday. “I’m very irate about it.”

Sullivan said she has already spoken with the New Hampshire Department of Justice, and officials there are “jumping right on it.”

New Hampshire’s attorney general, John M. Formella, released a statement Monday morning acknowledging an investigation into the fake robocalls and saying that the “messages appear to be an unlawful attempt to disrupt the New Hampshire presidential primary election and to suppress New Hampshire voters.”

He urged voters to disregard the messages and to notify the state’s Department of Justice election law unit if they receive the call.

“Although the voice in the robocall sounds like the voice of President Biden, this message appears to be artificially generated based on initial indications. The message appears to have been ‘spoofed’ to falsely show that it had been sent by the treasurer of a political committee that has been supporting the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary write-in efforts for President Biden,” the attorney general said.

The Biden reelection campaign also weighed in, noting that the issue had been referred to the New Hampshire attorney general’s office.