It's always interesting to see which people are playing dirty in US elections. I remember it was only only afew months back that one of the loudest Right wing political voices talking about election fraud..... was himself found guilty of election fraud.
It continues. A couple of right wing scum bags have been convicted of targeting black voters with robo calls trying to scare them off voting with a pack of lies.
One of the truly delightful outcomes of this case is the judge ordered the pair to spend 500 hours community service registering voters in low income Wasington suburbs. How fitting.They also face a $5m fine for
Rightwing election robocall fraudsters must spend 500 hours registering voters
Jacob Wohl, 24, and Jack Burkman, 56, targeted Black voters with phony telephone messages before 2020 election
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Jacob Wohl, and Jack Burkman (in masks) are seen in this image from video during a court appearance in Detroit in 2020. Photograph: AP
Maya Yang in New York
Thu 1 Dec 2022 05.05 AEDTLast modified on Thu 1 Dec 2022 05.07 AEDT
Two men convicted of fraud for targeting Black voters with phony robocalls before the 2020 election must spend 500 hours registering voters in low-income neighborhoods of Washington DC, an Ohio judge ruled.
The calls told people they could be arrested or forced to receive vaccinations based on information they submitted in votes by mail.
Jacob Wohl, 24, of Irvine, California, and Jack Burkman, 56, of Arlington, Virginia – rightwing operatives with a history of targeting
Democrats and other
public figures – pleaded guilty last month, each to a single felony count of telecommunications fraud.
The judge in Cuyahoga county common pleas court, John Sutula, also fined each man $2,500 and placed them on two years’ probation. They were ordered to spend six months in home confinement, beginning at 8pm each day.
“I think it’s a despicable thing that you guys have done,” Sutula said, comparing their actions to violence used to suppress Black voters in the south in the 1960s.
Wohl and Burkman were indicted in October 2020, accused of arranging for a voice broadcast service to make about 85,000 robocalls to predominantly Black neighborhoods in Ohio, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois in the run-up to the 2020 general election.
Prosecutors said the pair were responsible for 3,500 calls to residents of Cleveland and East Cleveland.
According to James Gutierrez, an assistant Cuyahoga county prosecutor, the robocalls warned voters that police, credit card companies and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would use personal information obtained from mail-in ballots to find individuals with arrest warrants and credit card debt, Cleveland.com reported.
Some calls told voters personal information would be used to carry out forced vaccinations.
According to a
script published by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, one call said: “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 safe and beware of vote by mail.”
Gutierrez
said: “All of that is false … there is not one kernel of truth into what they said in that recording.”
Jacob Wohl, 24, and Jack Burkman, 56, targeted Black voters with phony telephone messages before 2020 election