Nov. 14, 2023

Damon Hewitt

Melanie Campbell

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - For much of the last century, segregationists and their anti-Black racist allies who were intent on ensuring that African-Americans couldn’t exercise the right to vote, erected an assortment of barriers to that end.

Segregationists used the courts, local and state laws, literacy tests, poll taxes, fraud, brute force, violence and intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan to impede and prevent Black people from exercising their constitutional right.

In the 21^st century, voter suppression has gone high-tech with the same characters still plotting to control who votes, when and how. They are employing an assortment of methods including Artificial Intelligence (AI). Concerns about misuse of AI in the electoral ecosystem is what brought Melanie Campbell and Damon T. Hewitt to testify before the U. S. Congress.

Campbell, President & CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation (NCBCP) and Convener of the Black Women’s Roundtable (BWR), spoke of the urgency around creating safeguards and federal legislation to protect against the technology’s misuse as it relates to elections, democracy, and voter education, while fighting back against the increasing threats surrounding targeted misinformation and disinformation. 

“AI has the potential to be a significant threat because of how rapidly it’s moving,” Campbell said. There was Russian targeting of Black men with misinformation in 2020 to encourage them not to vote. It started in 2016.”

Both civil rights leaders warned that misinformation driven by artificial intelligence may worsen considerably for African-American voters leading up to the 2024 presidential election.

“What we have seen though our work demonstrates how racial justice, voting rights, and technology are inextricably linked,” said Hewitt, president and executive director of The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law during his testimony. “Voters of color already face disproportionate barriers to the ballot box that make it more difficult and more costly for them to vote without factoring in the large and growing cost of targeted mis- and disinformation on our communities.”

Hewitt said AI technologies could be used to refine and test data to generate targeted lists of voters based on the patterns, interests, and behaviors of specific individuals.

“Forget using zip codes as a proxy for race; the targeted lists of tomorrow will weaponize sophisticated machine learning technologies, using individual identities or behaviors to target Black voters with surgical precision, all in order to mislead and harm them,” he warned.

Campbell and Hewitt said that during recent election cycles, African Americans have been specifically targeted by disinformation campaigns.

“AI technology threatens to turn already fragile conditions for our democracy into a perfect storm,” Hewitt said. “The spread of misinformation and disinformation online to influence elections and disenfranchise voters, often specifically Black voters, is already commonplace. Communities of color who already sacrifice so much to cast a ballot and make our democracy work are increasingly subjected to new downsides of technological innovation without reaping the rewards.”

The pair referred to a lawsuit, NCBCP vs. Wohl, filed by the Lawyers’ Committee and involving NCBCP which was a plaintiff two men who targeted Black voters in New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio disinformation via robocalls in an effort to sway the outcome of the 2020 Elections.

“In the weeks before the 2020 Election, the Election Protection hotline received complaints from voters about robocalls using deceptive information to discourage people from voting. After investigating, we found that two individuals, Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, had sent 85,000 robocalls largely to Black Americans,” Hewitt said.

The goal was to discourage African Americans from voting by mail, lying that their personal information would be added to a public database used by law enforcement to execute warrants; to collect credit card debts; and by public health entities to force people to take mandatory vaccinations.

“These threats played upon systemic inequities likely to resonate with and intimidate Black Americans,” Hewitt said. “We filed a lawsuit, National Coalition on Black Civic Participation v. Wohl, in which a federal court issued a restraining order to stop the robocalls and later ruled that this conspiracy to silence Black voters was intimidating, threatening, and coercive in violation of the Voting Rights Act and Ku Klux Klan Act. The methods used for those deceptive robocalls in 2020 look primitive by 2023 standards. But they hold three important lessons for democracy when surveying the AI technology of today and tomorrow.”

Campbell concurred. She said AI would allow this type of weaponization to be more significant using texts, video and audio.

“AI increases the ability to do that in larger formats. We are trying to address this. Elections and democracy is really, really important,” she said. “So many places that can go. So much you can do online now. You have open source where just about anyone who wants to can use AI for nefarious means. There is a lot of angst with those doing voting rights and elections work.

You don’t know how bad it can be until you know how bad it’s been.”

Campbell and Hewitt agree that the exploding capabilities of AI technology can drastically multiply the amount of harm to American democracy. Campbell adds that Google, Microsoft and Meta are the front line companies who activists hope will step up and put guardrails in place because the 2024 elections is overwhelmed by AI-driven misinformation and disinformation.

“In malicious hands and absent strong regulation, AI can clone voices so that calls sound like trusted public figures, election officials, or even possibly friends and relatives,” said Hewitt. “In malicious hands and absent strong regulation, AI can clone voices so that calls sound like trusted public figures, election officials, or even possibly friends and relatives. The technology could reach targeted individuals across platforms, following up the AI call with targeted online advertisements, fake bot accounts seeking to follow them on social media, customized emails or WhatsApp messages, and carefully tailored memes.”

Hewitt said the technology could send messages reaching targeted individuals across several platforms. Then the messages would be followed up with AI calls, targeted online advertisements, fake bot accounts seeking to follow these people on social media, customized emails or WhatsApp messages, and carefully tailored memes.

During his testimony, Hewitt detailed five principals that should guide AI regulation and legislation to protect US democracy, including regulation of AI to protect Americans’ civil rights, by including an anti-discrimination provision directed at online contexts and algorithms; AI should be evaluated and assessed, both before and after deployment, for discrimination and bias; developers and those deploying AI should “have a duty of care” indicating that their products are safe and effective. And if not, they should be held liable.

AI regulation should include transparency and “explainability” requirements so people are made aware of when, how, and why AI is being used; using data protection requirements, to ensure that AI is not used to grab data from those who have not given their consent; and voter information should not be tied to private information to target voters without safeguards.

The effort being led by the Lawyers’ Committee and the NCBCP comes against the backdrop of similar alarm from the Biden administration, some lawmakers and AI experts who fear that AI will be weaponized to spread disinformation to heighten the distrust that significant numbers of Americans have towards the government and politicians.

President Joe Biden recently signed what’s described as “a sweeping executive order.” The order focuses on algorithmic bias, preserving privacy and regulation on the safety of frontier AI models. The executive order also encourages open development of AI technologies, innovations in AI security and building tools to improve security, according to the Snyk Blog.

Vice President Kamala Harris echoed others concerned about this issue who fear that malevolent actors misusing AI could upend democratic institutions and cause American’s confidence in democracy to plunge precipitously. In her remarks, Harris cited the need for a more expansive definition of AI safety to encompass the "full spectrum" of threats, embracing the spread of disinformation, discrimination and bias.

“When people around the world cannot discern fact from fiction because of a flood of AI-enabled disinformation and misinformation. I ask, ‘is that not existential?” Harris said in speech at a Nov 1 press conference at the 2023 AI Safety Summit in London, England. “For democracies, AI has to be in service of the public interest. We see the ways AI poses a threat to Americans every day, certainly in politics and we are laying the foundation for an international framework to regulate AI.

Harris concluded, “We’re going to do everything we can. This is one of the biggest concerns most people have.”

Nov. 7, 2023

SPECIAL TO THE TRICE EDNEY NEWS WIRE FROM BLACKMANSSTREET.TODAY

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The jobless rate in October for Black men and Black women was 5.8 percent, the highest among all other groups surveyed.

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 150,000 jobs in October, and the unemployment rate changed little at 3.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.

Job gains occurred in health care, government, and social assistance. Employment declined in manufacturing due to strike activity.

Among the other major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (3.7 percent), adult women (3.3 percent), teenagers (13.2 percent), Whites (3.5 percent), Asians (3.1 percent), and Hispanics (4.8 percent).

Nov. 14, 2023

Cliff Albright, Black Voters Matter

Kami Chavis, law professor

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - By most measures, the Republican Party got an old-fashioned beating by an American electorate who rejected the current iteration of the Republican Party, Trumpism and the party’s extremist MAGA agenda.

Across 37 states, Nov. 7, Americans voted for governors, judges, school boards and local ballot initiatives in what is called an “off year” or non-presidential election. By Wednesday morning, Democrats - with its base of Black voters - emerged as winners in Kentucky, Ohio and Virginia. Perhaps the most consequential result was in Ohio where an unusual coalition of Democrats, Republicans, liberals, moderates and conservatives, young and old, passed Issue 1 – 57 percent to 43 – which enshrines abortion and reproductive rights into Ohio’s constitution.

“One thing we’re seeing in terms of abortions and some other issues is that there is real anger around what (former President Donald) Trump and the Supreme Court did,” said Bill Fletcher, prominent labor union leader, former president of TransAfrica Forum and a senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies. “It’s also playing out in Ohio and Kansas. It’s kind of a popular rejection of male authority. I think this is fantastic. And the school board losses show that it has gone but so far.”

Law Professor Kami Chavis concurred.

“Honestly, to me, it’s not surprising because when you look at most of the polls, they tell you that America is not in favor of restrictions. These views cross the political spectrum,” said Chavis, the R. Hugh and Nolie Haynes Professor of Law and Director of the W&M Center of Criminal Justice Policy and Reform at William & Mary Law School. “We do not want the pendulum to swing too far. We don’t want to go back to women in back alleys, or in this time, having to travel so far to get reproductive healthcare.”

The string of electoral losses by Republicans since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade last year is clear evidence of the extreme public displeasure and resistance to what the court and far-right elements have been pushing, pundits and critics said. According to the Washington Post, whenever abortion rights positions have appeared on the ballot, they have won 75 percent of the time across more than 50 polls and two dozen states.  

“Opposition to criminalizing doctors and erecting other barriers to women’s reproductive health should be a message to Republicans and anti-abortion policymakers,” said Chavis, a constitutional Law professor with a law degree from Harvard Law School. She is a former assistant US attorney for the District of Columbia.

Meanwhile, in Virginia, Democrats won full control of the state legislature by holding their majority in the Senate and seizing control of the House of Delegates. These wins denied Gov. Glenn Youngkin an electoral trifecta and the power to impose his conservative agenda. The governor had promised a 15-week abortion ban as a “sensible compromise,” but Democrats fought back with ads and statements which tied Youngkin to the extremist faction of the GOP.

Political experts and pundits said that although Virginia voters didn’t have to vote directly for or against abortion rights, the contentious, divisive and consequential issue infused all the campaigns. Of particular importance reproductive rights activists and supporters said, is the fact that Virginia has become the last southern sanctuary and refuge for those seeking access to legal abortions and reproductive care.

Controlling the General Assembly will give Democrats the numbers and leverage to block fundamental portions of Youngkin and the GOP’s conservative agenda. Democrats are expected to introduce constitutional amendments for voters to enshrine abortion rights into the state’s constitution and end the permanent disenfranchisement of returning citizens with felony convictions.

With the electoral shift, House Minority Leader Don Scott (D-Portsmouth) is poised to become the first Black speaker in the House’s more than 400-year history.

“We’ve been telling you all since day one that Democrats had the message, the candidates, and the momentum to put a stop to the extreme Republicans’ agenda,” Scott said during a victory speech in Richmond.

Chavis said the off-year election results left her hopeful and optimistic. She also lauded wins by African Americans in Rhode Island (Gabe Amo, elected the state’s first Black congressman); and Cherelle Parker, 51, chosen as Philadelphia’s 100th mayor. She is the Black and the first woman to ascend to that position.

“(Parker’s win) is adding to Black mayors in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago,” Chavis said. They are not getting elected because they represent Black interests. They represent broad cross-sections of our country. I think we really can’t separate this from greater representation across the politic spectrum. It’s good to see. It’s not healthy or sustainable that one party only represents one ethnic or racial group.”

Voting Rights and social justice activist Cliff Albright said these victories were made possible by sustained work by devoted activists in the trenches.

“As we reflect on the events of Tuesday, one thing is clear – local elections matter and your voices matter,” said Albright, co-founder and executive director of BlackVotersMatter (BVM) in an email statement. “Black voters impacted key races and were victorious on several critical issues: In Kentucky, we supported partners like KY BLACK, KY Commonwealth Alliance Voter Engagement (CAVE), VOCAL, NAACP, Until Freedom and others to get out the vote for the governor's race targeting key cities such as Louisville, Frankfort, and Lexington. In Virginia, voters helped retain control of the Senate and helped take back the House, preventing any abortion ban. Candidates won in 3 out of 5 house districts that BVM targeted, including the competitive HD (House District) 97 which produced the decisive 51st Democratic seat.”

Albright said BVM supported the work of partners such as the Ohio Unity Coalition with canvassing, texting, and phone banking. 

“In Ohio, voters were able to pass two ballot referendums. The first enshrined a constitutional right to abortion and the second legalized recreational marijuana use,” he said.

Albright said 83 percent of Black Ohioans voted in the affirmative for the abortion issue, while African-Americans were 72 percent of those who voted for legalization of recreational marijuana.

During an interview with a Trice Edney reporter, Albright said his organization has been working “to change the discourse, change the narrative and lean into power we already have.”

“The issues that we focus are largely issues that affect the Black community. When we come up everybody comes up on voting rights, economic justice and Medicaid expansion,” said Albright. “There’s no point in US history where Black folks didn’t advance our interests that didn’t advance the nation. It’s about everybody being able to advance. The way we organize is to focus on Black-led organizations that serve the Black community, but we do this in partnership with organizations on the ground.”

Albright – a 2020 Soros Fellow who has been deeply involved in the activist-led efforts and a lawsuit that forced the redrawing of a congressional district map in Alabama – said he usually doesn’t spend much time celebrating because those white supremacists in politics and elsewhere are always working to cook up voter suppression strategies designed to rob African Americans’ constitutional rights. He said he’s acutely aware of the games certain legislators and policymakers play, all with the intent of blocking any attempts by he, fellow activists and voting rights advocates who are working to bring parity and justice to the electoral process.

“They are trying to take away our votes. They are not guided by commonsense, justice or rightness,” said Albright. “We see anti-Black white supremacy in the Alabama legislature. White supremacy never takes a day off. It’s always playing the long game. When you’re in power, you can play the long game.”

 Nov. 7, 2023

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - For the first time since the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) began collecting credit card data, the nation’s related debt reached an all-time high of $1 trillion in 2022. Newresearch released in late October examines how and why this debt grew, but also how emerging trends in card usage affect the day-to-day lives of consumers.  

While companies charged consumers more than $105 billion in interest and more than $25 billion in fees, average credit card balances per cardholder returned to about $5,300, about the same as before the pandemic. At the same time, more cardholders are being charged late fees, falling behind on payments, and facing higher costs on growing debt.  

Today nearly one in 10 consumers is caught in what CFPB terms ‘persistent debt’, charged more in interest and fees than they pay toward the principal owed, a pattern that makes each passing month’s charges increasingly harder to avoid. Average credit card minimum payments on revolving credit accounts now reach over $100 per month and are also a contributing factor to rising late fees and overall debt. 

"With credit card debt crossing the trillion- dollar mark, we will be working to prevent bait-and-switch tactics when it comes to rewards and to increase refinancing activity so consumers can get lower rates,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra.  

Increased indebtedness also translated into record industry profits, now higher than those reached in pre-pandemic years. Two key factors, according to the report, significantly contributed to industry profitability: an average APR margin of 15.4 percentage points above the prime rate in 2022, and only 10 credit card companies dominating the marketplace.  

Although the nation has nearly 4,000 credit card issuers, four-fifths – 80 percent – of the card activity was with one of the firms in the top10.  

The highest credit card APRs are, as with other consumer financial products, among consumers who carry high credit card balances, missed payment(s), or delinquent accounts, and have subprime credit ratings, scores of less than 670 in a range of 300- 850.  Consumers who have filed bankruptcies can also expect that action to affect their credit scores for seven years thereafter.  

A 2019 report by Experian, one of the nation’s three credit card bureaus, found that more than a third of consumers – 34.8 percent – were classified as subprime. Millennials comprised the largest number of subprime borrowers.   

According to Experian, “Prime consumers tend to have more mortgages and credit card accounts, while subprime consumers have more student loans and personal loans…Subprime consumers have twice as many personal loan accounts as prime consumers on average. That said, their average balance is less than half of prime consumers’ average balance.” 

CFPB’s new credit card report found that many cardholders with subprime scores paid 30 to 40 cents in interest and fees per dollar borrowed each year. Further, consumers using reward cards that earn bonus points for frequent usage, earned just 27 percent of rewards at major credit card companies, but paid 94 percent of total interest and fees for carrying debt from month to month.   

Last year, and for the first time since 2015, CFPB found a spike in over-limit transactions. According to the report, “Recent changes in incidence are also driven by accounts with subprime scores. Over-limit transactions tend to be more common among lower-score cardholders since these cardholders typically have lower credit limits and higher credit utilization than higher-score cardholders, making it more likely that even a modest purchase might exceed their credit limit.” 

Along with high profits, CFPB’s new report documents a growing consumer shift toward digital communications, websites and mobile apps now used by nearly 80 percent of cardholders to manage card usage and make payments. Among consumers ages 25 and younger, 95 percent used mobile apps for card transactions.    

Consistent with consumer practices, credit card companies and debt collectors are now relying more on text messaging and email to contact borrowers about past-due balances, in addition to phone calls or postal mail.  

In separate and independent findings, the New York Federal Reserve’s Liberty Street blog also noted changing credit card practices earlier this year.  

“[T]here were 18.3 million borrowers behind on a credit card at the end of 2022 compared to 15.8 million at the end of 2019. Instead, the evidence suggests that higher prices and higher interest rates are the more likely culprits driving delinquencies… [O]n a person-level, this financial distress is real, and the delinquent marks will impact their access to credit for years to come.”  

Charlene Crowell is a senior fellow with the Center for Responsible Lending. She can be reached at CharleneThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..