Douglass Mackey, an individual who opposed Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 presidential election and posted deceptive messaging online that claimed Clinton supporters could vote via text, which was not accurate, has been sentenced to prison over his actions. His prison sentence, which follows a conviction by a jury of conspiracy against rights, is seven months.
The whole incident hearkens to comments made just recently by Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who said the evidence he’d seen pointed to attempted election corruption coming actually from Republicans rather than Democrats or the ill-defined pro-Biden forces who Trump still claims were somehow responsible for his loss in 2020. Trump, of course, actually started with his false claims of widespread malfeasance in elections all the way back around the 2016 elections, not long after Mackey was pulling what’s now landed him with a stint in jail.
Trump claimed, wrongly, that millions of improper votes had been included in 2016’s totals, which saw Clinton leading Trump nationally in the popular vote — something in which Trump still hasn’t prevailed.
Mackey’s online messaging was specifically styled to resemble campaign messaging from the Clinton team. The materials included a number that readers could supposedly text to cast their ostensible votes for Clinton, and, well, people did. “On or about and before Election Day 2016, thousands of unique telephone numbers texted “Hillary” or some derivative to the 59925 text number, which had been used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by Mackey and his co-conspirators,” the Justice Department said.
Though Mackey’s followers on Twitter (now X) only reached the tens of thousands, he was still rated by a university media analysis to be among the most influential individuals online in the then-upcoming 2016 election’s context. Mackey isn’t the first pro-Trump online troll to face serious consequences. Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, a far-right duo, perpetrated a robocall scheme before the 2020 election claiming — falsely — that voting by mail could expose participants to debt collection and the execution of past warrants. The two were hit this year with some $5 million in fines by the Federal Communications Commission.
