Ben & Jerry’s is churning out a campaign against laws that restrict access to voting.
The ice cream giant on Tuesday announced a new flavor, Empower Mint, as part of the nascent effort to register voters in states where new rules meant to curb virtually nonexistent fraud threaten to keep eligible voters away from ballot boxes. The mint ice cream contains chunks of brownie and swirls of fudge.
“There’s been an organized and coordinated attempt to keep certain groups of voters out of the process — people of color, low-income people, especially,” Jerry Greenfield, one of the Unilever-owned company’s co-founders, told The Huffington Post in an interview last week.
“Instead of expanding voting and making the United States and democratic as it can be — setting an example for the rest of the world — there has been this effort to prevent people from voting when there’s been no evidence there’s any kind of problem with voting or voting fraud. It’s absurd,” said Greenfield.
Ben & Jerry’s campaign, though national in scope, is centered on North Carolina, which has become a major political battleground during this fever-dream of an election year.