Two conservative operatives responsible for placing tens of thousands of calls in Midwestern states that made false claims about the legitimacy of mail-in ballots were sentenced by an Ohio judge to spend hundreds of hours registering new voters.

The operatives, Jack Burkman, 56, of Arlington, Virginia, and Jacob Wohl, 24, of Irvine, California, orchestrated a robocall scheme that targeted Black neighborhoods in Ohio in 2020, prosecutors said.

More than 8,000 of the roughly 67,000 phone calls the pair made across the Midwest, using a voice broadcasting service, were sent to phone numbers in Cleveland and East Cleveland, where many Black voters reside, prosecutors said. The calls were placed during the pandemic, before the 2020 election, a time of heightened interest in absentee voting because of rising concerns about health and safety.

The calls falsely stated that voting by mail meant that the personal information of people who cast those ballots would be added to a public database and that they would be tracked by authorities.

“Don’t be finessed into giving your private information to the man,” the recorded message said, according to a court filing in Michigan, which said Burkman and Wohl specifically targeted “Black neighborhoods” in the Midwest, including Cleveland. “Stay safe and beware of vote by mail.”

The prerecorded messages claimed that mail-in voting would result in a cascade of negative consequences, including pursuit by authorities for outstanding debts and...

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