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A pro-Trump activist convicted for his role in an effort to suppress Black votes in 2016 is headed to the clink after he was sentenced on Wednesday. Douglass Mackey, a conservative troll who led a social media campaign to fool people into thinking they could vote via text for then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, has been sentenced to seven months in federal prison.
As I wrote in April, Mackey has become a cause célèbre in far-right circles, where commentators like Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson have claimed Mackey was targeted solely for harmless mockery. But the evidence showed his behavior to be more than simple trolling.
Federal Judge Ann M. Donnelly told Mackey during his sentencing that he had been “one of the leading members” of the conspiracy to suppress votes and that it had been “nothing short of an assault on our democracy,” according to The New York Times.
Authorities offered evidence for how Mackey conspired with other right-wing social media influencers to target potential Clinton supporters with fraudulent claims about how to vote by text (a thing you can't do), all while Mackey and others discussed a desire to limit Black voter turnout in the election. Authorities also laid out how Mackey used graphics similar to the Clinton campaign’s to dupe users into thinking his fake text-to-vote promotions were real. Prosecutors alleged at least 4,900 texts were sent to the phony number Mackey promoted.
Interestingly, as my colleague Jordan Rubin explained for the Deadline: Legal Blog months back, Mackey was charged with “conspiracy against rights," a charge that special counsel Jack Smith leveled against Donald Trump in his 2020 election interference case.
Hillary Clinton talked about Mackey's scheme during a sit-down with California Rep. Nancy Pelosi in April.
“Democracy requires at least a minimal level of trust, and how do you compromise with somebody unless you have some way to trust what they’re saying and what they will do, for example?” Clinton said. “So if we are going to turn our politics over to people who — maybe just for the heck of it — are making up stuff to misrepresent leaders, or maybe because they know they can achieve it if they do, then where does this stop?”
Watch a clip here:
There’s nothing funny about voter suppression. And that Elon Musk, who owns the social media platform X, has downplayed Mackey's crime after his sentencing is yet more evidence that similar disinformation campaigns could spread on the platform in the future.
But for now, I like to imagine Clinton getting a little satisfaction as one of her campaign's foremost trolls heads to federal prison for essentially trying to deprive people of their right to vote.