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"Vaguely Threatening" Robocalls Continue In NY Area, Warning People To "Stay Home" Ahead Of Election
By
Gwynne Hogan
Published Oct 31, 2020
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By
Gwynne Hogan
Published Oct 31, 2020
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Mariah Montgomery, a 38-year-old from Kensington, Brooklyn, received two strange robocalls recently warning her to “stay home.”
“This a test,” the recording of a robotic female voice said. “Time to stay home. Stay home and stay safe.”
For a second, she thought it could be about COVID-19, then a second thought popped into her mind.
“I interpreted it as a warning that it was not safe to go out of my house during the last week of this election,” she said. “It definitely struck me as possible voter misinformation.”
With the general election just days away, concerns about voter intimidation are becoming more widespread, after an incident where conservative activists were charged with using robocalls to threaten Black voters.
Montgomery wrote about the call on Twitter and Brian Callaci, a friend who lives in Cranston, Rhode Island, said he’d gotten the same call last Friday.
“Wait a minute. That was kind of creepy,” Callaci, 37, recalled thinking. “Maybe some kind of voter suppression thing.”
He described it as “vaguely threatening.”
Listen to Gwynne Hogan's report on WNYC:
The brief call, which Gothamist/WNYC learned about through ProPublica’s Electionland tip line, sounds similar to the last line of a longer robocall that went out to some 85,000 voters in August.
That call, which circulated in largely Black neighborhoods, was paid for by right-wing operatives and conspiracy theorists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman. The language of the August robocall more explicitly discouraged people from casting ballots by mail in this year’s general election:
Hi, this is Tamika Taylor from Project 1599, the civil rights organization founded by Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl. Mail-in voting sounds great, but did you know that if you vote by mail, your personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants and be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts? The CDC is even pushing to use records for mail-in voting to track people for mandatory vaccines. Don’t be finessed into giving your private information to the man, stay home, stay? safe and beware of vote by mail.
Wohl and Burkman were ordered this week by a federal judge in Manhattan to make corrective calls to everyone who received the first one. On Wednesday, a U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero of New York’s Southern District ordered the Wohl and Burkman to call 85,000 voters back to tell them the first call contained false information, which their attorneys said they’d done, in court filings Friday. Judge Marrero found on Friday that their efforts had been “insufficient” in that they’d only shown evidence that 29,000 of 85,000 people who got the first robocall, received the follow up one.
The pair also face criminal charges in Michigan and Ohio, as well as a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by several voters in New York who received the robocalls along with the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation.
It’s not clear if the two robocalls are related. Lacy Crawford, a spokesperson for the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights Under Law, said the group had received several reports about the shorter robocall recently, though the call has been circulating around the United States and Canada for several months.
“To the best of our current knowledge, this is not election related,” Crawford said.
Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office, said they hadn’t received any reports of the “stay safe and stay home,” robocall, but said they had received several reports about the one from Burkman and Wohl, though he didn’t immediately say if the office had investigated the complaints.
David Marc Schwartz, an attorney for Wohl and Burkman, wouldn’t comment on the “stay home and stay safe” call. He disputed that the earlier call had been intended to deter voting.
“I want to make it very clear that the calls themselves were not racist,” he said. “The only thing the calls talk about were some of the issues with mail-in voting, not a voter suppression case.”
Schwartz's denial appeared to contradict emails obtained by plaintiffs’ attorneys and filed in federal court Friday. The emails, which the plaintiffs' lawyers did not disclose to Gothamist/WNYC where they obtained them, included exchanges between Wohl and Burkman and Message Communications, Inc., a group that specializes in mass robocalls, discussing plans to target robocalls to “black neighborhoods in Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Richmond, Atlanta and Cleveland.”
“I love these robo calls[.] getting angry black call backs[.] win or lose the black robo was a great jw idea,” Burkman wrote to Wohl on August 26th. It's unclear what "jw" indicates.
On August 19th, Burkman wrote to Robert Mahanian, a representative from Message Communications, Inc.
“Check to you Robert just went out in the 2 day pouch you will have in 2-3 days Then we attack,” the email reads.
Schwartz said he didn’t know where the emails came from and declined to comment further. Message Communications, Inc. didn’t return a request for comment right away.
The robocalls had targeted major cities including New York. Westchester resident Andrea Sferes, 56, one of the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit, received one on August 26th. She described it as “persuasive, intimidating, false and infuriating.”
“I was completely incensed,” she told Gothamist/WNYC. “I felt a spike in my nervous system when this happened. This is crossing a line.”
Amy Walsh, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, said voters shouldn’t be deterred by Wohl and Burkman’s robocall or any other.
“You should go vote,” she said. “You should put on a mask and go vote.”
Tagged
voter suppression
early voting
election 2020
Gwynne Hogan
Gwynne Hogan is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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