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      Millions of US voters lack access to documents to prove citizenship

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      Nearly one in 10 eligible voters lack easy access to documents to prove their citizenship, according to a new survey, underscoring how Republican efforts to purportedly prevent non-citizens from voting could disenfranchise millions.If asked to quickly locate a passport, birth certificate or naturalization papers to produce proof of citizenship tomorrow, more than 21 million Americans – about 9% of eligible voters – would not be able to, according to the survey, conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice, VoteRiders, Public Wise, and the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement (CDCE) at the University of Maryland. Nearly 4 million American citizens – 2% in total – lack access to any form of proof in citizenship.The survey comes as Donald Trump and his allies have seized on fears about immigration to make the threat of non-citizen voting a major talking point ahead of November. Republicans have exaggerated the threat of non-citizen voting – which is already illegal and rare – and have pushed for federal legislation that would require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections.“We all know – intuitively – that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable,” Mike Johnson, the US House speaker, said last month.Two states that have already tried measures to require documentary proof of citizenship, Kansas and Arizona, offer case studies in how such a restriction can disenfranchise voters. In Kansas, 30,000 people had their voter registration held up between 2013 and 2016 because of the law. In Arizona, a proof-of-citizenship requirement for state elections has negatively affected tribal voters and college students.Researchers also found racial disparities in who has access to citizenship documents. About 3% of voters of color do not have access to proof-of-citizenship documents, compared with 1% of white Americans. Americans of color were also more likely to not have easy access to the documents compared with their white counterparts.“Our estimates are probably conservative measures of impact,” the researchers wrote in a blogpost announcing their findings. “While it’s true that most Americans can access these documents, most of us don’t walk around town carrying our passport or birth certificate. If those documents were required for voter registration, most would not have them readily available to take advantage of opportunities they encounter at schools, churches or other community spaces where registration drives register many Americans to vote.”About 4% of independents, 2% of Democrats and 1% of Republicans lacked easy access to proof-of-citizenship documents, the survey found.In addition to citizenship, the survey also found that about 21 million Americans of voting age do not have a non-expired driver’s license, with non-white voters less likely to have one.About 30% of Black Americans between 18 and 29 did not have a driver’s license and 47% did not have one with a current name or address. About 5% of white Americans in the same age group did not have a driver’s license, and 42% did not have one with a current name or address.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Millions of eligible voters lack a current form of photo ID – and it’s not easy to get one,” said Lauren Kunis, the executive director of VoteRiders, which helps people get ID. “Getting an ID can mean needing to track down underlying proof-of-citizenship documents like a birth certificate, navigating bureaucracy and paperwork, or spending hours at an ID-issuing office that is hard to reach. For these reasons and many more, voter ID laws make it more complicated, costly and confusing to cast a ballot in America today.”The survey is consistent with a Brennan Center survey nearly two decades ago that found 7% of Americans do not have easy access to proof-of-citizenship documents.“The current protections against non-citizen voting are effective: ballots cast by non-citizens are vanishingly rare,” the researchers wrote. “Requiring proof of citizenship would solve nothing, but it would create major barriers to registration for eligible voters, especially those who already face disproportionate barriers to participation in our democracy. We should be making it easier, not harder, for these citizens to participate.” More

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      Will Trump, a convicted felon, be able to vote for himself in November?

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      Despite his 34 felony convictions, Donald Trump will likely still be able to cast a vote for himself in November because of Florida and New York’s voting rights restoration laws.Florida, where Trump has his primary residence, allows people convicted of felonies to vote depending on the law in the state where they are convicted.New York is one of 23 states where people convicted of a felony can vote, even if they are on parole or probation, as long as they are not incarcerated.“A felony conviction in another state makes a person ineligible to vote in Florida only if the conviction would make the person ineligible to vote in the state where the person was convicted,” Florida’s department of state website reads.But Florida’s law is confusing, especially after state voters passed amendment 4 in 2018, which restored the right to vote to most people with felony convictions who have completed all terms of their sentence. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which led the campaign for amendment 4, has sued over the process, but dropped a lawsuit against the state earlier this month after the department of state said it would hold a workshop to update the process for people with felony convictions to learn about their voting eligibility.Trump could lose his right to vote if he were incarcerated on 5 November, but legal experts say it is unlikely he will be sentenced to jail time. There will also likely be a lengthy appeal which could extend past election day.“We have to wait to see what happens with Trump’s sentencing and possible appeal in New York to see what happens with [his] voter eligibility,” said Neil Volz, deputy director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. “That said, we are in uncharted territory when it comes to people with convictions being able to vote.”“After New York goes through their process, whether President Trump can vote with a felony conviction will depend on what the state of Florida does,” he added. “Our belief is that no one should be above the law or below the law when it comes to voter eligibility for people with convictions, and that everyone should operate under the same set of standards.”If Trump did lose his right to vote, he could always apply for rights restoration with Florida’s clemency board, which is made up of Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, and his cabinet. The board is scheduled to meet three more times in 2024. DeSantis endorsed Trump when he dropped out of the presidential race in January. More

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      Supreme court rules South Carolina doesn’t need to redraw congressional map to consider Black voters

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      South Carolina Republicans do not need to redraw their congressional map, the US supreme court ruled on Thursday, saying that a lower court had not properly evaluated the evidence when it ruled that the lawmakers had discriminated against Black voters.In a 6-3 decision, the justices sent the case back to the lower court for further consideration. The decision, in Alexander v South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, is a major win for Republicans, who hold a slim margin in the US House with six of South Carolina’s seven congressional seats. It also could give lawmakers more leeway to discriminate in redistricting and use partisanship as a proxy for race. That could be enormously powerful in the US south, where voting is often racially polarized.“A party challenging a map’s constitutionality must disentangle race and politics if it wishes to prove that the legislature was motivated by race as opposed to partisanship. Second, in assessing a legislature’s work, we start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” wrote Samuel Alito in an opinion that was joined by the court’s five other conservative justices.“The three-judge district court paid only lip service to these propositions. That misguided approach infected the district court’s findings of fact, which were clearly erroneous under the appropriate legal standard.”The dispute centered on the way the Republicans who control the state legislature redrew the state’s first congressional district after the 2020 census. After Nancy Mace narrowly was elected in 2020, they shifted the district’s boundaries to make it much friendlier to Republicans. As part of that effort, they moved 30,000 Black voters from Mace’s first district to the sixth, currently represented by Jim Clyburn, a Black Democrat. A lower court had ruled that lawmakers had impermissibly relied on race when they drew it after the 2020 census, saying they had to redraw the district.The case had dragged on for so long, however, that the lower court and the supreme court recently allowed South Carolina to use the district for this year’s election.Mac Deford, an attorney challenging Mace, observed oral arguments in person. Deford said he watched Chief Justice John Roberts wrestle with the connection between race and politics.“From my viewpoint, there was some signaling that they were going to draw some sort of line between race and politics. And I think that they did in this case,” Deford said, noting how in the earlier decision Shelby v Holder Roberts had proposed the idea that southern legislators had long abandoned heavy-handed racial discrimination in voting.“This could be sort of setting the stage for a subsequent case, maybe next year, that could be brought on the Voting Rights Act that could further strip away the vote.”The challengers in the case, the South Carolina branch of the NAACP and a South Carolina voter, argued that those actions violated the 14th amendment’s ban on sorting voters based on race. South Carolina Republicans argued that they were motivated by partisanship, not race.In 2019, the supreme court said that there was nothing federal courts could do to stop gerrymandering based on partisanship. Sorting voters based on race, however, still remains unlawful. This was the first case that came to the court since its 2019 decision, forcing the justices to clarify their standard when the two issues are intermingled.The lower court had relied on a trove of evidence and experts that the challengers offered to conclude that South Carolina Republicans were sorting voters based on their race. One of those experts used an algorithm to draw 20,000 maps that didn’t take race into account but complied with traditional redistricting criteria. But Alito and the other conservative justices said that evidence was not good enough.Alito zeroed in on the fact that the challengers in the case had not offered an alternative map that achieved the partisan goals of Republican lawmakers – a safe Republican district – and that also had a higher Black voting age population as the challenged district. Such a map, he wrote, was critical to proving that South Carolina Republicans had considered race above other considerations.“Without an alternative map, it is difficult for plaintiffs to defeat our starting presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” he wrote.That rationale drew a sharp rebuke from Elena Kagan, who accused the majority of getting the decision “seriously wrong” and inventing “a new rule of evidence”.“As of today, courts must draw an adverse inference against those plaintiffs when they do not submit a so-called alternative map – no matter how much proof of a constitutional violation they otherwise present,” the liberal justice wrote in an opinion. “Such micro-management of a plaintiff ’s case is elsewhere unheard of in constitutional litigation. But as with its upside-down application of clear-error review, the majority is intent on changing the usual rules when it comes to addressing racial-gerrymandering claims.”Kagan went on to outline how Thursday’s decision would give states much more leeway to enact discriminatory maps and voting policies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“In every way, the majority today stacks the deck against the challengers. They must lose, the majority says, because the state had a ‘possible’ story to tell about not considering race – even if the opposite story was the more credible,” Kagan wrote in the opinion, which was joined by the court’s two other liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.“When racial classifications in voting are at issue, the majority says, every doubt must be resolved in favor of the state, lest (heaven forfend) it be ‘accus[ed]’ of ‘offensive and demeaning’ conduct.”Leah Aden, a lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund who argued the case on behalf of the plaintiffs at the supreme court in October, said the decision “usurps the authority of trial courts to make factual findings of racial discrimination as the unanimous panel found occurred with South Carolina’s design of congressional district 1”. She said the challengers would continue to fight to redraw the map at the lower court.Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Alito and the court majority had “once again come up with a legal framework that makes it easier for Republican states to engage in redistricting to help white Republicans maximize their political power”.“He did so by reversing the burden of proof that should apply in these cases in two ways to favor these states: pushing a ‘presumption of good faith’ and raising the evidentiary burdens for those challenging the maps,” he wrote on his blog.Clarence Thomas, a conservative justice, also wrote a lengthy separate concurring opinion in the case saying that federal courts should not be involved in policing constitutional claims of racial discrimination in redistricting – a radical idea that would be a break with the court’s longstanding jurisprudence. “It behooves us to abandon our misguided efforts and leave districting to politicians,” he wrote. The concurrence was not joined by any of the other justices.Joe Biden also criticized the decision in a statement Thursday afternoon.“The Supreme Court’s decision today undermines the basic principle that voting practices should not discriminate on account of race and that is wrong,” he said. “This decision threatens South Carolinians’ ability to have their voices heard at the ballot box, and the districting plan the Court upheld is part of a dangerous pattern of racial gerrymandering efforts from Republican elected officials to dilute the will of Black voters.”George Chidi contributed reporting More

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      Minority Rule review: rich history of America’s undemocratic democracy

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      Ari Berman’s new book is a rich history of America’s ambivalent attitude toward majority rule. The founding document declared “all men are created equal”, but by the time a constitution was drafted 11 years later, there was already a severe backlash to that revolutionary assertion.To prevent the union from disintegrating, free states and big states repeatedly gave in to slave states and small states, producing a constitution that would be adopted by the majority.The first and worst decision was to give each state two senators regardless of population. Virginia had 12 times the population of Delaware. Today, the situation is vastly worse: California is 63 times bigger than Wyoming. By 2040, Berman writes, “roughly 70% of Americans will live in 15 states with 30 senators, while the other 30%, who are whiter, older and more rural … will elect 70 senators”.The filibuster, a delaying tactic that led to most legislation requiring 60 votes to pass the Senate – but which has no basis in the constitution – makes the country even more undemocratic. Forty Republican senators representing just 21% of the population have blocked bills on abortion rights, voting rights and gun control supported by big majorities.The House of Representatives was supposed to be closer to the people than the Senate, which wasn’t even elected by voters when first created. But when the free states placated the slave states by allowing them to count every enslaved Black person as three-fifths of a human being, for the purposes of representation, that increased how many representatives slave states sent to the House.To Berman, it was “a fundamental contradiction that the nation’s most important democratic document was intended to make the country less democratic”. As the New Yorker Melancton Smith noted at the time, the constitution represented a “transfer of power from the many to the few”.The national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, Berman also offers a horrific description of the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by modern-day oligarchs to make America even more undemocratic. In just six years, the Federalist Society raised an astonishing $580m “through a shadowy network of a dozen dark money nonprofit groups” to put its “preferred judges on the bench”. The society has gotten a huge bang for its buck – more than 500 judges appointed by both Bushes and 226 appointed by Donald Trump were endorsed by the Federalists.The worst results of this hammerlock on judicial appointments are at the very top of the pyramid: “For the first time in US history, five of six conservative justices on the supreme court have been appointed by Republican presidents who initially lost the popular vote and confirmed by senators representing a minority of Americans.”And what is the “signature project” of these justices? The dismantling of the civil rights laws that are the greatest legacy of the 1960s.Federalist Society judges worked in lockstep with the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, whose priority has been to put an end to all effective limits on who can spend how much in every election.“I never would have been able to win my race if there had been a limit on the amount of money I could raise and spend,” McConnell wrote of his first race, in 1984. Eighteen years later, the Republican John McCain and Democrat Russ Feingold managed to ban unlimited donations. Their law survived McConnell’s first lawsuit to undo it, on a 5-4 supreme court vote. But four years later, after the extremist Samuel Alito replaced the moderate Sandra Day O’Connor, the court gutted the law, allowing unlimited corporate expenditure as long as ads “didn’t explicitly” endorse a candidate.“Thus began a trend,” Berman explains. “GOP-appointed judges reliably supported Republican efforts to tilt the rules and institutions of democracy in their favor … which in turn helped Republicans win more elections and appoint more judges, with one undemocratic feature of the system augmenting the other.”As the country’s founders adopted a constitution that disenfranchised all Black people and all women, modern conservatives do all they can to keep the voting rolls as unrepresentative as possible, particularly as people of color become the majority in the US. Racism remains the strongest fuel for efforts to make it as hard as possible for Black and younger voters to exercise their franchise.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe worst recent example of this was the failure of a narrowly Democratic Senate to adopt a voting rights act in 2021. It failed when Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, both Democrats then, refused to alter the filibuster rule. Manchin supported the bill, then reversed with a specious explanation: while the right to vote was “fundamental to American democracy … protecting that right … should never be done in a partisan manner”Berman’s book ends on a more hopeful note, with descriptions of Democratic victories in Michigan and Wisconsin.In Michigan, a 29-year-old activist, Katie Fahey, figured out she could end the gerrymandering which had let the Republicans dominate her state by putting a ballot initiative before the voters. She needed 315,000 signatures. In one of the few good news stories about social media, she was able to use Facebook to gather 410,000 signatures in 110 days without any paid staff. In 2018, the reform won with an amazing 61% of the vote. Another initiative that dramatically expanded voter access through automatic and election-day access passed by 66%.The end of gerrymandering enabled Democrats to flip both houses in Michigan in 2022, “giving them control of state politics for the first time in 40 years”. And in Wisconsin, the election of an additional liberal justice to the state supreme court finally ended Republicans’ domination of the state government.The hopeful message is clear: despite massive Republican efforts to suppress liberal votes, it is still possible for a well-organized grassroots campaign to overcome the millions of dollars spent every year to prevent the triumph of true democracy.
      Minority Rule is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux More

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      US judges reject new Louisiana voting map with second majority-Black district

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      A new congressional map giving Louisiana a second majority-Black House district was rejected on Tuesday by a panel of three federal judges, fueling new uncertainty about district boundaries as the state prepares for fall congressional elections.The 2-1 ruling forbids the use of a map drawn up in January by the legislature after a different federal judge blocked a map from 2022. The earlier map maintained a single Black-majority district and five mostly white districts, in a state with a population that is about one-third Black.“We will of course be seeking supreme court review,” the state attorney general, Liz Murrill, said on social media. “The jurisprudence and litigation involving redistricting has made it impossible to not have federal judges drawing maps. It’s not right and they need to fix it.”The governor, Jeff Landry, and Murrill had backed the new map in a January legislative session after a different federal judge threw out a map with only one mostly Black district.The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, chaired by former attorney general Eric Holder, said backers of the new map will probably seek an emergency order from the supreme court to keep the new map in place while appeals are pursued.The US district judges David Joseph and Robert Summerhays, both of whom were nominated to the bench by former president Donald Trump, said the newest map violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment because “race was the predominate factor” driving its creation.Judge Carl Stewart dissented, saying the majority gave too little weight to the political motivations involved in drawing the map.“The panel majority is correct in noting that this is a mixed motive case,” Stewart wrote. “But to note this and then to subsequently make a conclusory determination as to racial predominance is hard to comprehend.”The ruling means continued uncertainty over what the November election map will look like. Another federal district judge, Shelly Dick of Baton Rouge, has ruled that the state is probably in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act because it divides Black voters not included in majority-Black district 2 among five other congressional districts.But Tuesday’s ruling from the divided federal panel noted that “outside of south-east Louisiana, the state’s Black population is dispersed”. The majority criticized the new mostly Black district, which stretched across the state from Shreveport in the north-west into south-east Louisiana, linking black populations from the Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge metro areas.The panel set a 6 May status conference. Meanwhile, the case before Dick in Baton Rouge is still alive, and state election officials say they need to know the district boundaries by 15 May. The sign-up period for the fall elections in Louisiana is in mid-July.The decision gives new hope to Representative Garret Graves, a white Republican incumbent whose district was seriously altered by the new map. And it raises questions for state senator Cleo Fields, a Democrat and former Congress member who had declared he would run in the new district.Representative Troy Carter, the only Democrat and only Black member of the state’s current congressional delegation, criticized the ruling.“This is just plain WRONG,” Carter posted on the social platform X on Tuesday evening. More

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      Prosecutor to appeal against Texas woman’s acquittal over voting error

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      A Texas prosecutor will appeal against a court ruling tossing out a five-year prison sentence for a woman who unintentionally tried to vote while ineligible in the 2016 election, an unexpected move that continues one of the most closely watched voting prosecutions in the US.Last month, the second court of appeals, which is based in Fort Worth, threw out the 2018 conviction of Crystal Mason, a Black woman who submitted a provisional ballot in 2016 that ultimately went uncounted. Mason was on supervised release for a federal felony at the time she voted and has said she had no idea she was ineligible. The panel said prosecutors had failed to prove Mason actually knew she was ineligible.But the Tarrant county district attorney, Phil Sorrells, a Republican, announced on Thursday he was appealing to the Texas court of criminal appeals, the highest criminal court in Texas.“The trial court’s guilty verdict should be affirmed. Voting is a cornerstone of our democracy. This office will protect the ballot box from fraudsters who think our laws don’t apply to them,” Sorrells said in a statement. “The second court of appeals’ publication of its opinion creates the very real risk that future sufficiency cases will likewise be wrongly analyzed and decided.”When election workers were unable to find Mason’s name on the voter rolls on election day in 2016, they offered her the chance to cast a provisional ballot. The key piece of evidence used to convict her was testimony from election workers saying they believed she had read an affidavit warning that someone cannot vote until they complete “any term of incarceration, parole, supervision, parole or probation”.Mason says she did not read the affidavit and that no one ever told her she could not vote. It is undisputed that she was never told she could not vote.“It is disappointing that the State has chosen to request further review of Ms Mason’s case, but we are confident that justice will ultimately prevail. The court of appeals’ decision was well reasoned and correct. It is time to give Ms Mason peace with her family,” Thomas Buser-Clancy, an attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an email.Mason has already had to serve an additional 10 months in federal prison while she appeals the state conviction. She remains free on an appeal bond and is living in Fort Worth.“I’m truly saddened at this moment that the state in this upcoming election is still sending a message,” Mason said in a text message. “I just don’t understand. My heart is very very heavy right now.” More

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      Trump and Mike Johnson push for redundant ban on non-citizens voting

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      Donald Trump and the House speaker, Mike Johnson, plan to push for a bill to ban non-citizens from voting, the latest step by Republicans to falsely claim migrants are coming to the country and casting ballots.Voting when a person is not eligible – for instance if they lack US citizenship – is already illegal under federal law. It is unclear what the bill Johnson and the former president will discuss in their Friday press conference at Mar-a-Lago will do to alter that. But it is one more way for the former president to focus on election security and to ding the Biden administration over the situation at the US-Mexico border, a key issue for likely Republican voters this November.Like the other claims Trump makes about the 2020 election being stolen, the talking point about migrant voting does not have facts to back it up.There is no evidence of widespread non-citizen voting, nor are there even many examples of individual instances of the practice, despite strenuous efforts in some states to find these cases. A large study by the Brennan Center of the 2016 election found that just 0.0001% of votes across 42 jurisdictions, with 23.5m votes, were suspected to be non-citizens voting, 30 incidents in total.One review in Georgia found about 1,600 instances of non-citizens registering to vote from 1997 to 2022. In these instances, safeguards in the process worked: none of these attempts led to someone being allowed to register, because they did not submit proof of citizenship needed to be added to the voter rolls.The Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, has a database of voter fraud cases across the country, which, according to the Washington Post, includes just 85 cases of non-citizen voting since 2002.Some of the isolated instances of non-citizens voting in the last decade have involved people who were confused about their eligibility and did not do so intentionally.In general, people who are undocumented avoid scenarios that could leave them vulnerable to deportation, such as voting illegally.The lack of prosecutions over migrant voting has not stopped Trump from making claims on the campaign trail that it will somehow steal the election from him, or that it has already happened in other elections in which he was on the ballot.“I think they really are doing it because they want to sign these people up to vote. I really do,” Trump said in Iowa in January. “They can’t speak a word of English for the most part, but they’re signing them up.”Trump is not the only one spreading this falsehood – it’s part of a longstanding Republican line of attack on immigration and Democrats. Now, the myth is also being pushed by Elon Musk, the owner of X, and the prominent Trump-aligned figure Cleta Mitchell, who has been circulating a two-page memo laying out “the threat of non-citizen voting in 2024”, according to reporting by NPR, which obtained the memo.Because this is a concern Republicans consistently bring up, some states have added new laws to try to remove non-citizens from voter rolls or undertaken audits of their voters to assess citizenship status.But, voting rights advocates have warned, these often run the risk of ensnaring naturalized citizens and other people who are eligible to vote and booting them from the voter rolls. One attempt in Texas in 2019 led the then secretary of state to send letters to nearly 100,000 people, including US citizens who were erroneously warned they might not be eligible to vote.Widespread voter fraud, in general, does not exist in the US. There are instances of voter fraud prosecuted across the US every election, but even statewide taskforces have been unable to uncover large numbers of cases, and certainly nothing close to the scale that could swing elections. More

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      Two far-right conspiracy theorists to pay up to $1.25m for robocall campaign

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      Two far-right conspiracy theorists will pay up to $1.25m in fines for launching a robocall campaign to discourage Black New York voters from participating in the 2020 election, the New York attorney general announced on Tuesday.Jacob Wohl, of Irvine, California, and Jack Burkman, of Arlington, Virginia, were found liable in March 2023 for targeting about 5,500 Black voters as part of the robocall scheme.Under the latest settlement agreement, Wohl and Burkman will pay more than $1m to the New York attorney general’s office, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation (NCBCP) and individuals harmed in the robocall campaign.The three parties filed a lawsuit against Wohl and Burkman in 2021 after an investigation by the attorney general’s office found that the pair had broken several state and federal laws.In New York, callers were falsely told that their personal information would be added to a public database and used by police departments to track outstanding warrants or for mandatory Covid-19 vaccinations.One call claimed to come from a spokesperson for a “civil rights organization” founded by Wohl and Burkman, according to a script shared in the press release.“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,” the call said.The call then warned that voters should not be “finessed into giving your private information to the man” and should “beware of vote by mail”.One voter suffered “severe anxiety and distress” from the robocalls and later withdrew his voter registration, the press release said.To address the robocalls’ false claims, NCBCP used “considerable resources” to reach misinformed voters.In Tuesday’s release, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, called the robocall scheme “depraved”.“Wohl and Burkman orchestrated a depraved and disinformation-ridden campaign to intimidate Black voters in an attempt to sway the election in favor of their preferred candidate,” James said.“These men engaged in a conspiracy to suppress Black votes in the 2020 general election,” said the NCBCP president, Melanie Campbell, in Tuesday’s press release. “They used intimidation and scare tactics, attempting to spread harmful disinformation about voting in an effort to silence Black voices. Their conduct cannot and will not be toleratedThe settlement agreement is the latest punishment for Wohl and Burkman, who ran similar schemes in at least two other states.Wohl and Burkman were previously ordered to complete 500 hours of registering voters in lower income neighborhoods by an Ohio judge after pleading guilty to charges in connection to a similar robocall campaign.Wohl and Burkman also face additional charges in Michigan, CNN reported. More