Federal election interference charges filed against a Florida man who allegedly directed his large social media following to cast legally invalid votes through text messages or social media posts could have wide-ranging implications for how authorities handle false election information in the future.
Last week, Seth DuCharme, the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, announced election interference charges against West Palm Beach resident Douglass Mackey over posts he made to a Twitter account under the pseudonym Ricky Vaughn in 2016 that, among other things, encouraged Hillary Clinton’s supporters to vote via text instead of casting an actual ballot.
The case against Mackey, a right-wing poster whose influence on the 2016 election MIT researchers said outpaced NBC News and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, is narrow, and federal authorities appear to have honed in on Twitter posts that could have disenfranchised voters. They said at least 4,900 unique numbers texted some variation of Clinton’s name to the number he provided.
“This a very clear-cut case where it wasn’t just false information,” said Micah Rasmussen, director of Rider University’s Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics. “It was false information that caused people to not vote or may have caused people to not vote.”
It’s not clear how many of those numbers belonged to individuals who later cast valid votes.
Despite the narrowness of the charges, their very existence could dissuade malefactors from purveying falsehoods in an effort to decrease turnout.
“You also can very easily imagine that if this is the new stance of the Justice Department, you could very easily imagine where this is not the end of the road,” Rasmussen said.
New Jersey is well acquainted with shady campaign tactics, but they rarely result in criminal penalties. When they do, the charges frequently relate to ballot violations — like ballot harvesting in violation of bearer limits, for instance.
But there are other abuses that, even if they don’t rise to criminality, could convince voters to stay home on election day.
Campaigns and candidates have been known to traffic in dubious information to win an edge over their opponents. Sometimes, those bids to influence voters are carried out in anonymous online blogs using attacks on patently false grounds.
“I can’t tell you that an anonymous blogger is going to cut their losses because of this, but I certainly think if somebody wants to keep themselves on the right side of the law, this would be something that they should consider,” Rasmussen said.
Prosecutors will likely wish to avoid cases that lack a direct link to voter disenfranchisement. Arguing the validity of a given political attack, however false or ill-willed, would open authorities up to accusations of politicization.
State Attorney General Gurbir Grewal last year took the extraordinary step of telling then-GOP U.S. Senate candidate Hirsh Singh to stop sending a letter asking voters who cast ballots for primary rival Rik Mehta, the contest’s winner, to vote again.
Voting twice in New Jersey is a third-degree felony carrying a penalty of up to five years imprisonment. Federal statue prescribes the same penalties for voting twice, and inducing a voter to cast more than one ballot is illegal under those same statutes.
Singh, a perennial candidate who is now mounting a longshot bid for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, wasn’t charged over the letter, which set off a wave of condemnations from Republican county leaders, but he filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice claiming Grewal interfered in the election all the same.
But the charges against Mackey were clearly intended to send a message, even if they came years after his alleged violations.
“There is no place in public discourse for lies and misinformation to defraud citizens of their right to vote. With Mackey’s arrest, we serve notice that those who would subvert the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on the cloak of Internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes,” DuCharme said last week. “They will be investigated, caught and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
The propagation of disinformation on social media is dangerous primarily because, as studies have shown, most readers have difficulty discerning truth from falsehoods. Well-meaning users can, and often do, spread disinformation.
But, Rasmussen said, the Mackey case shouldn’t necessarily be a cause for concern among well-intentioned residents who unknowingly share falsehoods.
“We all absolutely should be more careful, but do I think you in your living room may wind up with the cops at your door? I don’t think it’s going to come to that,” he said.
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