A Democratic operative has been indicted after admitting that he crafted a deepfake robocall of President Joe Biden discouraging New Hampshire residents from voting when he was working for Democratic primary challenger Dean Phillips during the primaries. Steven Kramer earlier said that the call was to prove a point about AI in elections.
Kramer faces five counts in the indictment, including intimidation, bribery, and suppression, according to WMUR9. The indictments name five people who got the robocall. It is not clear how he has pleaded to the charges.
Earlier in February, Kramer hired a street magician, whose name is Paul Carpenter, to create the audio recording and the transcript. Carpenter eventually came forward, and as a result, Kramer admitted to the actions, but said it was only an act of civil disobedience against AI.
“This is a way for me to make a difference, and I have,” he said in an interview. “For $500, I got about $5 million worth of action, whether that be media attention or regulatory action.”
The call went out to thousands of voters ahead of the primary and told voters to "save" their votes for the November election. The call prompted officials and watchdog groups to take notice and the Federal Communications Commission banned unsolicited AI robocalls to stop future instances.
Phillps and his campaign stated in response to the actions at the time, “Our campaign repeats its condemnation of these calls and any efforts to suppress the vote, " according to NBC.
Before the call in New Hampshire, Kramer did a test run in the South Carolina primary. A call asking 300 Republicans who they were going to vote for with a deepfake of Senator Lindsay Graham went out for the test run. After the primary, he waited until New Hampshire in order to call 5,000 voters telling them not to vote. He said that the effort to call all the voters in the northeast state Democratic primary “wasn’t going to change anything."
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