Be careful about robocalls and texts spreading misinformation about voting to make you less likely to vote. The message could be that you polling place has changed, your mail-in ballot could be tampered with, one of the candidates has quit the race, voting will expose private information, voting will give information to the police or debt collectors, or voting will subject you to various undesirable consequences.

If you do hear something that will change your voting behavior, always try to confirm it.

These attempts are active this year. Here is part of a filing in a court case this month against some of those scammers.

29. Below is the complete transcript of the robocall:

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 safe and beware
of vote by mail.

The court issued a restraining order against the scammers. I will quote from the order. I have put in bold a few sections that are particularly important.

Introduction

The right to vote embodies the very essence of democracy.
Absent free and fair elections uninfluenced by fear, the
underpinnings of democratic rule would crumble. The United
States Constitution, as enforced by Congress and the courts,
enshrines these principles.

In 1871, Congress, in a measure designed to safeguard
the right to vote constitutionally guaranteed to all eligible
United States citizens, enacted the Ku Klux Klan Act.
Historically, that statute derived from the harm experienced
by newly emancipated and enfranchised former slaves. Seeking
to cast their votes in federal and state elections, they
encountered, at home and at the polls, blatant intimidation
carried out by open threats, economic coercion, and even
physical violence inflicted to prevent their participation in
the nation’s electoral process.

Today, almost 150 years later, the forces and conflicts
that animated Congress’s adoption of the Ku Klux Klan Act as
well as subsequent voting rights legislation, are playing out
again before this Court, though with a difference. In the
current version of events, the means Defendants use to
intimidate voters, though born of fear and similarly powered
by hate, are not guns, torches, burning crosses, and other
dire methods perpetrated under the cover of white hoods.
Rather, Defendants carry out electoral terror using
telephones, computers, and modern technology adapted to serve
the same deleterious ends. Because of the vastly greater
population they can reach instantly with false and dreadful
information, contemporary means of voter intimidation may be
more detrimental to free elections than the approaches taken
for that purpose in past eras, and hence call for swift and
effective judicial relief.

Many Plaintiffs in this case assert that they were
recipients of robocalls initiated by Defendants conveying
messages that placed recipients in reasonable fear of casting
their votes in the impending presidential election, in person
or by mail. Upon initial factual review, this Court finds
that the information Defendants’ calls convey is manifestly
false and meant to intimidate citizens from exercising voting
rights.

Defendants do not contest that they originated the
robocalls. In fact, by their own admission in other public
statements they reportedly made, they have worked overtly to
influence potential voters through disinformation campaigns.
Instead, as legal ground for their action, Defendants advance
a sinister and pernicious theory. They contend that the
expression their robocalls communicated constitutes speech
protected by the First Amendment. Defendants’ theory
implicates a fundamental threat to democracy. This Court thus
rejects it as justification for Defendants’ baneful conduct.
The First Amendment cannot confer on anyone a license to
inflict purposeful harm on democratic society or offer refuge
for wrongdoers seeking to undermine bedrock constitutional
principles. Nor can it serve as a weapon they wield to bring
about our democracy’s self-destruction.

Accordingly, for the reasons stated below, Plaintiffs’
motion for a temporary restraining order is GRANTED.

Here is a news article about the leaders in this scam.

Meet the GOP operatives who aim to smear the 2020 Democrats — but keep bungling it

Be careful. Some folks want to prevent you from voting. Sometimes it involves fooling you with misinformation or disinformation.