Two right-wing conspiracy theorists were ordered by an Ohio judge to register voters in low-income neighborhoods in the Washington, D.C., area in order to target Black voters in the 2020 presidential election.
The ruling came after the two men pleaded guilty to a single felony count of telecommunications fraud for sending out thousands ofrobo calls during the 2020 presidential election.
The Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge John Sutula fined each man $2,500 and ordered them to wear ankle monitors for the first six months of their two-year supervised release. The requirement to register to vote must be fulfilled by June.
The two men were indicted in October 2020 on eight counts of telecommunications fraud and seven counts of bribe taking. About 85,000 calls were made to mostly Black neighborhoods in Ohio, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois.
The purported script of the calls was published by the New York Attorney General.
The script said that the person was from Project 1599, a civil rights organization. If you vote by mail, your personal information will be used by police departments to track down old warrants and be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts. Mail-in voting records could be used by the CDC to track people for mandatory vaccinations. Don't give your private information to the man, stay safe and vote by mail.
The two men were sued in federal court in New York City for voter intimidation. The FCC fined them $5.1 million.
The men were responsible for over 3000 calls to residents of Cleveland. Many states were expanding mail-in voting for the 2020 presidential election in order to protect it from COVID.
Criminal charges were filed against them in Detroit for a scheme that targeted Black voters. Attorneys for the two men were contacted by Yahoo.
Scott Grabel said that his client plans to fulfill his duty despite the unusual sentence.
According to the senior vice president of strategy and advancement at the NAACP, it is a historic pattern. It suppresses the vote because it scares people from voting.
Sutala said that most of the civil rights advances in the United States have happened in his lifetime and compared the two men who used violence to suppress Black voters in the 1960s.
Before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, scare tactics were used against Black voters on local and state levels to prevent them from voting. The defendants used a modern version of these tactics.
Specific tactics have been used to target African American men and women in the past. The grandfather clause cut the number of eligible black voters in Mississippi from 90 percent to 6 percent. All of the other tactics such as poll taxes, literacy tests, or English language requirements are designed to discriminate against African Americans, immigrants, and low-income populations.
He apologized to the court and said he was sorry and shamed. He wants to echo that sentiment. According to the Washington Post, the men have been involved in a number of political stunts to spread misinformation in 2020.
The requirement to register voters in low-income neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. will be "transformative" according to Watkins.
Watkins thinks that these types of sentences are meant to make sure that people have to interact with people they are potentially harming. It doesn't change the hearts and minds of these two individuals, but it puts them squarely in the communities that they have impacted.
The tabulation of completed hours of community service will be quantified, but a key question looms over how it will be done. The Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court was waiting on Sutula's journal entry to learn how the men's sentence would be enforced.
Ideally, you would assign these individuals to work with a community based organization that does this type of community engagement. I hope that they are connected to the community. I believe that if you have to spend time with living, breathing human beings and see the humanity of people, that is what is transforming.
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