(Headline USA) The New Hampshire attorney general’s office on Monday said it was investigating reports of an apparent robocall that used artificial intelligence to mimic President Joe Biden’s voice and discourage voters in the state from coming to the polls during Tuesday’s primary election.
A recording of the call reviewed by The Associated Press generates a voice similar to Biden’s and employs his often-used phrase, “What a bunch of malarkey.” It then tells the listener to “save your vote for the November election.”
“Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again,” the voice mimicking Biden says. “Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday.”
Attorney General John Formella said the recorded message, which was sent to multiple voters on Sunday, appears to be an illegal attempt to disrupt and suppress voting. He said voters “should disregard the contents of this message entirely.”
It’s not known who is behind the calls, though they showed up to recipients as coming from the personal cellphone number of Kathy Sullivan, a former state Democratic Party chair who helps run Granite for America, a super-PAC supporting the Biden write-in campaign.
Sullivan said she alerted law enforcement and issued a complaint to the attorney general after multiple voters in the state reported receiving the call Sunday night.
“This call links back to my personal cell phone number without my permission,” she said in a statement. “It is outright election interference, and clearly an attempt to harass me and other New Hampshire voters who are planning to write-in Joe Biden on Tuesday.”
However, despite the write-in campaign on behalf of the incumbent president, the Biden campaign itself and the Democratic National Committee would seem to be the ones with the greatest motive for encouraging voters to boycott the primary.
The DNC already has signaled that it does not plan to include the votes of New Hampshire’s delegates during its convention after the state scoffed at its demand to yield to decades of tradition as the first-in-the-nation primary.
Democrats feared that Biden could potentially lose the race to one of his lesser-known competitors, including Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota or new-age author Marianne Williamson.
At least 19 other candidates are also listed on the Democrat ballot, such as Paperboy Love Prince and Vermin Supreme.
A lower turnout of Democrat voters would underscore the DNC’s influence over party politics versus and perhaps teach the maverick state a lesson, while also mitigating the risk of a humiliating defeat for Biden.
Meanwhile, it also offers the possibility of plausible deniability in the event that such an upset does occur, giving Biden and DNC gaslighters the opportunity to claim that election interference from the mysterious source was the culprit.
“We have been concerned that generative AI would be weaponized in the upcoming election and we are seeing what is surely a sign of things to come,” said Hany Farid, an expert in digital forensics at the far-left University of California, Berkeley, who reviewed the call recording and confirmed it is a relatively low-quality AI fake.
The Federal Election Commission is weighing public comments on a petition for it to regulate AI deepfakes in campaign ads.
The Biden administration might further use the robocall, whether it is a false flag operation or not, as an opportunity to justify additional meddling by the Justice Department and other federal agencies in state-run elections, under the pretense that AI technology has made them impossible for the states alone to manage.
The president signaled as much in October, when he hinted at the possibility that AI could be used as a way to cover up his frequent gaffes and offensive statements.
“With AI, fraudsters can take three seconds recording of your voice,” he said while announcing new regulations to protect consumers. “I’ve watched one of me a couple of times—I said, ‘When the hell did I say that?’”
It was unclear how many people received the New Hampshire robocall, but a spokesperson for Sullivan said she heard from at least a dozen people who received it.
The attorney general’s office encouraged anyone who had received the call to email the state Justice Department’s election law unit.
Gail Huntley, a 73-year-old Democrat in Hancock, New Hampshire, who planned to write in Biden’s name on Tuesday, said she received the call at about 6:25 p.m. on Sunday.
She instantly recognized the voice as belonging to Biden but quickly realized it was a scam because what he was saying didn’t make sense. Initially, she figured his words were taken out of context.
“I didn’t think about it at the time that it wasn’t his real voice. That’s how convincing it was,” she said, adding that she is appalled but not surprised that AI-generated fakes like this were spreading in her state.
White House press secretary Karine Jean–Pierre maintained Monday that the call “was indeed fake and not recorded by the president.”
The Biden campaign was “actively discussing additional actions to take immediately,” campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement.
“Spreading disinformation to suppress voting and deliberately undermine free and fair elections will not stand, and fighting back against any attempt to undermine our democracy will continue to be a top priority for this campaign,” she claimed.
Though the use of generative AI to influence elections is relatively new, “robocalls and dirty tricks go back a long ways,” said David Becker, a former DOJ attorney and anti-Trump activist who now leads the Mark Zuckerberg-funded Center for Election Innovation and Research.
It was hard to determine whether the main intent of the New Hampshire calls was to suppress voting or simply to “continue the process of getting Americans to untether themselves from fact and truth regarding our democracy,” Becker claimed.
“They don’t need to convince us that what they’re saying, the lies they’re telling, are true,” he said. “They just need to convince us that there is no truth, that you can’t believe anything you’re told.”
Katie Dolan, a spokeswoman for the Phillips campaign, said his team was not involved and only found out about the deepfake attempt when a reporter called seeking comment.
“Any effort to discourage voters is disgraceful and an unacceptable affront to democracy,” Dolan said in a statement. “The potential use of AI to manipulate voters is deeply disturbing.”
The Trump campaign said it had nothing to do with the recording.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
