I have written this piece for Slate. it begins:

On Friday, a federal appeals court in New York will consider a case with key implications for the 2024 election. At issue is whether it violates federal law to trick people on social media and elsewhere about when, where, or how to vote, and whether such a law is consistent with the First Amendment. A ruling favoring the government would go a long way toward protecting voters.

Back in 2016, a man named Douglass Mackey, tweeting under the name “Ricky Vaughn,” repeatedly directed messages to Black voters encouraging them to vote by text for Hillary Clinton. The intent was to trick these voters out of their franchise; of course, votes sent by text don’t count. Thousands sent texts to vote. We don’t know how many of them later did not attempt to vote in a permissible way.

Mackey was convicted by a jury of violating a Reconstruction-era law, 18 U.S.C. § 241, that made it a crime for “two or more persons [to] conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” The federal government’s theory was that Mackey conspired with others to deprive voters of their right to vote.

On expedited appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2^nd Circuit, Mackey concedes that, “at worst,” his tweets containing false information about how to vote “were calculated to cause voters to send futile text messages and then stay home on election day.” But, he argues, Section 241 does not apply to conduct such as his, he was not on fair notice that Section 241 applied to conduct like his, and even if it covered this conduct, Section 241 would apply to so much protected speech that it would violate the First Amendment’s protection for freedom of speech.

In an amicus brief supporting the federal government, Protect Democracy, the Yale Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, and I take issue with Mackey’s first and third arguments….

Yale Daily News:

Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic filed an amicus brief on Feb. 12 in United States v. Mackey, a case currently at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The case involves an influential social media user convicted of attempting to convince voters to believe they could cast their votes through a false voting mechanic. 

The case centers on claims that Douglass Mackey, a social media influencer on X, formerly known as Twitter, made during the 2016 presidential election campaign. Mackey, who was known to his 58,800 followers as Ricky Vaughn, repeatedly tweeted false claims to supporters of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton LAW ’73 that they could cast their ballots via text message in the weeks leading up to the election.

Mackey was convicted by a New York jury in March 2023, ordered to pay a $15,000 fine and charged with violating Section 241, which prohibits conspiring to “injure” individuals’ federal rights or privileges, including the right to vote. He was sentenced to seven months in prison and appealed his conviction to the Second Circuit.

The YLS Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic filed its amicus brief in collaboration with Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan anti-authoritarian organization, on behalf of election law expert and UCLA School of Law professor Richard Hasen. The brief argues that a Reconstruction-era civil rights law can be utilized to prosecute deliberate misinformation regarding voting procedures, while still upholding the First Amendment’s right to freedom of speech….

“I really appreciated the opportunity to work on this case because I think combating election disinformation is going to be key to preserving our democracy, this year and beyond,” Victoria Maras LAW ’25, an MFIA clinic member who worked on the brief, told the News. “As a former Field Organizer, I know how important it is to get the right information out to voters, and, by the same token, how harmful it can be when misinformation spreads.”

Maras said she was grateful that this brief can show how people who conspire to spread false election information can be held accountable without threatening First Amendment free speech rights.

Another MFIA clinic member, Ben Menke LAW ’25, told the News that delving into the history of Section 241, which was passed in 1870, led him to examine transcripts of debates in Congress during that time. Through this research, Menke said that he uncovered the motivations of the legislators who first enacted the law, as well as the legal opinions of the judges who applied Section 241 at the time.

“Our brief offers clarity on the proper way to construe Section 241, and we show that the law is consistent with the First Amendment,” Menke told the News. “Bad actors are finding it easier to spread knowingly false information to interfere with the right of the people to vote. Enforcing Section 241 is one way the federal government can respond to this threat.”

In a statement to the News, James Lawrence, Mackey’s attorney, said that their core argument in defense of Mackey is that he did not have fair notice, required by the Fifth Amendment, that his conduct violated “clearly established” law.

Lawrence claimed that the amicus brief uses a Supreme Court case about a different law to argue that a rarely used legal concept, not accepted in many state courts and never applied in New York, should be turned into a federal crime for misleading election information.

“If a team of federal prosecutors never came up with this convoluted argument after pursuing this case for more than three years … how could Douglass Mackey be expected to know his conduct violated Section 241 in 2016?” Lawrence wrote in the statement. 

The MFIA clinic declined to comment on Lawrence’s statement….

Protect Democracy and the Yale Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic filed this Second Circuit amicus brief (with me as client and co-counsel) in United States v. Mackey. Mackey was convicted “under 18 U.S.C. § 241 for conspiring “to use Twitter to trick American citizens into thinking they could vote by text and stay at home on Election Day—thereby suppressing and injuring those citizens’ right to vote.” Gov’t Br. 2. Mackey has argued that section 241 does not cover such a scheme and that the law is facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment because it punishes too much protected speech.

In our brief, we explain that the statute, properly construed, both bars lies about when, where or how people vote intended to deprive people of their right to vote and that limiting section 241 to such empirically verifiable false speech assures that the law does not violate the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has already stated that the government “may prohibit messages intended to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures” consistent with the First Amendment. Minn. Voters All. v. Mansky, 138 S. Ct. 1876, 1889 n.4 (2018). Further, as explained in Protect Democracy’s blog post on the filing:

The primary question before the Second Circuit in Mackey’s appeal is whether the federal civil rights statute he was convicted under – which bans conspiring to “injure” any person in their exercise of federal rights – actually bars conspiracies to circulate false information about voting mechanisms and procedures. Professor Hasen’s amicus brief explains why intentionally false statements about voting mechanisms and procedures violate federal law, and why such speech can be punished without running afoul of the First Amendment’s protections.

In particular, to establish the applicability of Reconstruction-era civil rights protection to internet memes, the brief tracks the history of legal actions protecting the right to vote back to England in 1703. That history shows, among other things, a three-century-long recognition among judges that an intentional deprivation of the right to vote constitutes an “injury” for which the law provides a remedy. As a result, the brief argues, Mackey’s conduct clearly constituted a conspiracy to “injure” under long-recognized legal principles, even if the Reconstruction Congress would have had no idea what an internet meme is.

You can find the introduction to our brief below the fold, which relies heavily on common law tort principles protecting the right to vote and its explanation in the Restatement (2d) Torts section 865.