Thomas Lenz thought the text message was “just another text during election season” telling people to go vote at first.
He then read it. Instead, the anonymous message mentioned Wisconsin laws and said that breaking them could lead to up to $10,000 in fines or 3 1/2 years in jail. It also said, “Don’t vote in a state where you’re not eligible.”
“I was like, ‘Wait, this seems wrong,'” Lenz, a graduate student from La Crosse who is 22 years old, told the Journal Sentinel. “It sounds kind of dangerous. Like, “Hey, you might get in trouble if you vote.” What really bothers me is that it sounds like it was written in a very bad way.
Lenz is likely one of the thousands of young voters in Wisconsin who got the text message.
People who fight for voting rights want state and federal officials to look into the messages, which were sent on October 10. Last week, the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin asked the U.S. Department of Justice and the state Department of Justice to look into the matter in a letter sent by Free Speech for the People.
In the letter from October 15, they said, “The sender may continue to try to scare eligible young voters into not voting if there is not prompt investigation and action.”
The letter also says that the writer “targeted young voters aged 18–25,” such as young voters who work for the League of Women Voters and other groups in the University of Wisconsin System. The text message also got to at least one Journal Sentinel writer.
“Now many students and other young voters are fearful that they will face criminal prosecution if they register and exercise their right to vote — because of a malicious, inaccurate text sent by an anonymous party,” they said.
People in college can sign up to vote at either their home address or the place where they go to school.
A spokeswoman for the state Department of Justice, Gillian Drummond, said that the department “takes allegations of possible violations of election law seriously.”
“Wisconsin DOJ is reviewing the information provided and will assess what if any follow-up is appropriate based on the facts and the law,” she wrote in an email.
A spokesman for the Wisconsin Elections Commission, Riley Vetterkind, said in an email that the group can’t say “whether messages like these violate the law without receiving a formal complaint.”
“We understand that these third party text messages can be very frustrating for voters,” he said. “Voters should get their election information from official sources, like state or local election officials,” the report said. People who are voting can ignore these text messages because they were not sent by or linked to an official source.
Voters of Tomorrow, a group that helps people get out and vote, said this week that it would send “more than 350,000 texts to young Wisconsinites, mostly students, clarifying their voting rights and encouraging them to make a plan to vote” to fight the threats.
“As a Gen Z-led group, we strongly believe that our votes should be earned, not taken away,” said Mark Putman, who is in charge of Voters of Tomorrow’s Wisconsin chapter. “You’ve already lost as a campaign if the only way to win is for young people not to vote at all.” The scary text messages are sad, against democracy, and against the law.
The text message didn’t bother Lenz, who said he would still vote because he had already turned in his absentee ballot before seeing it. He did say, though, that he was worried it would scare other people.
“It just concerns me that other people out there like me, who might be students and having to vote absentee, that might be intimidated by the fact that there’s people threatening some sort of vague consequences,” he added. “I get mad when people try to do things like this because I believe voting is such an important part of democracy.” That there are people out there who don’t want to help someone get elected but instead want to keep people from practicing their rights.
Source: Threatening texts to college students prompt call for probe
