Robocalls fix sent to ‘electoral terror’ victims

NEW YORK >> Nearly 30,000 recipients of what a judge described as “electoral terror” robocalls designed to scare people from voting in four states, including Ohio and Pennsylvania, received new court-ordered calls Friday saying the earlier call had false information that intimidated voters.

Lawyers for two men who sent out the original messages notified U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in Manhattan that the corrective calls were sent Friday afternoon to comply with an order he issued on Wednesday.

The judge ordered the new calls after a nonpartisan civil rights organization, The National Coalition on Black Civil Participation, and several individuals who received the calls in August sued Jacob Wohl and lobbyist Jack Burkman.

The lawsuit said the robocalls were sent to residents of predominantly Black neighborhoods in

New York, Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania by the men, who face criminal charges in Ohio and Illinois. Through lawyers, the men maintain they engaged in protected speech and were factually correct.

The judge said Wohl had bragged publicly of their plans to influence politics through disinformation campaigns, saying he would weaponize his large social media following to cause disarray like the Russians did in the 2016 election.

The robocalls targeted 85,000 residents to say voting by mail would surrender private information to police and creditors and enable a federal agency to track them for “mandatory vaccines.” The corrective calls were sent to 29,117 numbers that had reached a person or message service.

Marrero said the robocall was an example of how technology in some ways was more damaging than the kind of tactics that led to passage in 1871 of the Ku Klux Klan Act.