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In the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, Douglass Mackey posted what looked like campaign ads on his social media account, according to federal prosecutors.
But the ads, which urged people to vote for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton via social media or text message — both invalid ways to cast a ballot — were fraudulent, prosecutors said. Mackey had posted them to his Twitter account, now known as X, where he had about 58,000 followers at the time.
Mackey, who supported former president Donald Trump, was convicted in March on a conspiracy against rights charge “stemming from his scheme” to trick potential voters, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York said at the time. On Wednesday, Mackey, 34, of West Palm Beach, Fla., was sentenced to seven months behind bars.
Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for New York’s Eastern District, said in a statement Wednesday that the prosecution was “groundbreaking,” adding that his office would continue litigating “crimes that threaten our democracy.”
“One of the foundational rights we hold as Americans, a right that many fought so hard to obtain, is the right to vote,” Peace said. “The defendant weaponized disinformation in a dangerous scheme to stop targeted groups, including black and brown people and women, from participating in our democracy.”
When Mackey, who posted online as “Ricky Vaughn,” was convicted, he faced up to 10 years in prison. His attorney argued for a sentence without prison time, writing in a September memo that Mackey had refocused his life on “family and friends, faith, and values of selflessness and love.”
Mackey is not the “Ricky Vaughn of seven years ago,” attorney Andrew Frisch wrote in the memo. Judge Ann M. Donnelly denied the request.
Frisch told The Washington Post on Thursday that Mackey plans to appeal.
Mackey tweeted false messages directed toward Clinton supporters between September and November 2016, the U.S. attorney’s office said in its news release Wednesday.
Mackey tweeted election-related memes that “either disparaged Hillary Clinton or supported Donald Trump,” Donnelly wrote in a memo Tuesday. The memo stated that Mackey was also a member of private social media groups of “self-described ‘trolls’ whose goal was to develop election memes that would ‘go viral’ and ‘trend.’ ”
At one point before Election Day, Mackey published tweets “suggesting the importance of limiting ‘Black turnout,’ ” prosecutors said. One of the ads, displayed in court documents, showed a photo of a Black woman standing in front of a blue “African Americans for Hillary” sign.
“Avoid the line,” the ad stated. “Vote from home.” It instructed viewers to text “Hillary” to a five-digit number.
The post, which came from an account with the “Ricky Vaughn” alias, was published with the hashtags “#ImWithHer” and “#GoHillary,” both slogans often used by Clinton supporters. At least 4,900 different numbers had texted the number on the ad, though it was not a real way to vote in the election, the U.S. attorney’s office said in a March news release.
Mackey was convicted on March 31 after a one-week trial.
In a statement after the conviction, Peace said the verdict showed that Mackey’s false messages related to the election had “crossed a line into criminality.”
The conviction “flatly rejects his cynical attempt to use the constitutional right of free speech as a shield for his scheme to subvert the ballot box and suppress the vote,” Peace added.
Amy B Wang and Shayna Jacobs contributed to this report.
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/10/20/douglass-mackey-election-case-sentence/