A Nov. 15 WorldNetDaily article by Bob Unruh began with a very familiar story:
Voters across America already may be familiar with the case of Douglass Mackey, known online as Ricky Vaughn, who in 2016 went to social media with a joke about voting for Hillary Clinton in that year’s presidential election by text message.
It was, actually, just an updated version of an election meme that’s been around for years. Depending on the political persuasion, it has appeared before as “Democrats vote on Tuesday, Republicans on Wednesday,” or vice versa.
But authorities failed to see Mackey’s humor, charged him with election interference, specifically., “conspiring with others in advance of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election to use various social media platforms to disseminate misinformation designed to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote.”
It sounds familiar because WND has been trying to turn Mackey into a victim for years — Mackey is a racist and misogynist alt-right Twitter troll, and there was no reason to believe he was joking when he tried to deceive black people into trying to vote on the wrong day. Unruh then got to the meat of the current situation:
The Daily Caller outlined the latest event: The left-wing AllVote which sent text messages to voters telling them they’d already voted.
That message was: “Records show you voted. Find where to vote early by on-demand mail ballot.”
The report explained, “The same Justice Department that threw a pro-Trump memesmith in prison for ‘election misinformation’ is currently nowhere to be found after a left-wing group sent false election information to untold numbers of swing state voters.”
The leftists later sent another text apologizing for the “error.”
AllVote claimed it did not intend to mislead.
Unruh seemed to ignore the fact that AllVote admitted to making an error — but left out the part where it inadvertently omitted the fact it was trying to reach out to people who voted in 2022, which got left out of the texts. While AllVote admitted it accidentally misled voters, Mackey has never admitted to, let alone apologize for, deliberately misleading voters though it’s clear that’s what he did.
Unruh also rehashed another false equivalence: “WND also reported when a television entertainer, Jimmy Kimmel, told Republican voters to vote late, on Thursday or Friday after the election this year.” As we also pointed out, Kimmel was obviously making a joke, while there was never a reason to believe Mackey was joking.