A social media influencer who was sentenced to seven months behind bars two years ago for posting anti-Hillary Clinton memes that federal prosecutors deemed “election interference” had his conviction overturned Wednesday by a New York-based appeals court.
Douglass Mackey, 36, posted satirical memes of a fake ad in 2016 falsely indicating voters could stay home and simply text “Hillary” to a phone number instead of showing up at the polls.
A three-judge panel on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit concluded that prosecutors failed to prove Mackey was knowingly partaking in a broader conspiracy to hoodwink voters.
“The case has been remanded to the district court with orders to immediately dismiss. Hallelujah!” Mackey later cheered on X.
Mackey had initially been sentenced in October 2023, but was out on bail during his appeal. His 2016 meme, which was posted shortly before the election, told voters to “Avoid the line” and “Vote from home” by texting a phone number.
At the time, Mackey made the post via an alias, “Ricky Vaughn,” a reference to Charlie Sheen’s character from the film “Major League.”
Prosecutors claimed some 4,900 unique phone numbers texted the number in the meme.
Twitter, as it was then called, eventually shut down the Vaughn account, and he garnered a spot on MIT’s top 150 influencers of that election cycle.
Mackey posted multiple memes that Brooklyn federal prosecutors cited in the case, accusing him of attempting to suppress votes. Some of the memes included bogus claims that they had been paid for by the Clinton campaign.
Some of the posts deployed the “Vote from home” line but targeted specific blocs of voters, such as Latinos and African Americans.
Mackey was accused of conspiring with other social media users in various chat rooms to chart ways to push Clinton opponent Donald Trump’s message, prosecutors said.
However, the appeals panel was unconvinced.
“The mere fact that Mackey posted the memes, even assuming that he did so with the intent to injure other citizens in the exercise of their right to vote, is not enough, standing alone, to prove a violation of [federal law],” Chief Judge Debra Ann Livingston wrote in the majority opinion.
“The government was obligated to show that Mackey knowingly entered into an agreement with other people to pursue that objective,” she added. “This, the government failed to do.”
“Its primary evidence of agreement, apart from the memes themselves, consisted of exchanges among the participants in several private Twitter message groups — exchanges the government argued showed the intent of the participants to interfere with others’ exercise of their right to vote,” the judges noted.
“Yet the government failed to offer sufficient evidence that Mackey even viewed — let alone participated in — any of these exchanges,” they added, noting “the government’s remaining circumstantial evidence cannot alone establish Mackey’s knowing agreement.”
