MANCHESTER, N.H. — A prominent New Hampshire Democrat plans to file a complaint with the state attorney general over an apparent robocall that appears to encourage supporters of President Joe Biden not to vote in Tuesday’s presidential primary.
The voice in the message is familiar — even presidential — as it’s an apparent imitation or digital manipulation of Biden’s voice.
“What a bunch of malarkey,” the voice message begins, echoing a favorite term Biden has uttered before.
The message says that “it’s important that you save your vote for the November election.”
“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,” it says.
The message concludes with a phone number belonging to Kathy Sullivan, a former New Hampshire Democratic Party chair who is now running a super PAC supporting the campaign to urge New Hampshire Democrats to write in Biden’s name in the primary.
Biden’s name does not appear on Tuesday’s ballot, a consequence of state elections officials setting the date of the primary ahead of South Carolina’s on Feb. 3, the first sanctioned contest of the 2024 nominating race under new Democratic National Committee rules.
But local supporters launched the late write-in effort as a way to both marshall support for Biden and send a message to the national party about the Granite State’s coveted, century-long tradition of holding the nation’s first primary.
In an interview, Sullivan said she began receiving calls Sunday evening from those who had received the message. One woman she spoke to told her that Biden had called her, though she said she was not a Biden supporter.
“I said, ‘You got a call from Joe Biden, and he gave you my number?’” Sullivan said she responded.
A volunteer for the write-in effort also received the call and recorded it, according to Sullivan, and shared it with organizers of the Biden write-in campaign. One of the organizers then shared it with NBC News.
It’s not clear how many voters received the call or which types of voters were targeted. Lists of voters’ phone numbers can be readily purchased from data brokers.
And Sullivan said while it isn’t clear who is behind the robo-call, “It’s obviously somebody who wants to hurt Joe Biden.”
“I want them to be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible because this is an attack on democracy,” said Sullivan, an attorney, who believes the call could violate several laws. “I’m not going to let it go. I want to know who’s paying for it? Who knew about it? Who benefits?”
She said she also plans to engage federal law enforcement in addition to the state attorney general’s office.
Sullivan served as party chair in 2002, when a so-called phone-jamming effort was carried out during a hotly contested U.S. Senate race. Two Republican officials, including the executive director of the state Republican Party and a Republican National Committee operative, were convicted of using computer-generated phone calls to disrupt Democrats’ get-out-the-vote call center operations.
The campaign of Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman challenging Biden for the nomination, said it was not aware of the calls but called it “wildly concerning.”
“Any effort to discourage voters is disgraceful and an unacceptable affront to democracy,” spokesperson Katie Dolan said. “The potential use of AI to manipulate voters is deeply disturbing.”
The Biden campaign, which says it is not involved in the write-in effort in New Hampshire, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign denied any connection to the call, saying, “Not us, we have nothing to do with it.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
