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Is this really banana republic stuff? Libel, slander and fraud were all already legal limits on free speech.
I do agree with OP that 4900 possibly lost Democrat votes in NY is pretty unlikely to have had any real impact on the election, and that there should be a lot of room to exercise leniency for judges. But sending a strong message that election interference won't be tolerated seems like a reasonable enough thing for a democratic country that wants to maintain legitimacy.
Do you consider punishing any form of providing fake election information to be going to far? I'm not sure the "it was just a joke" defense really gets off the ground here.
This is an absolutist statement that tries to paint it as binary option - either nothing at all related to the elections is prosecuted, or anything can be prosecuted if only it could be attached to the election somehow. Of course, neither is the case. Some things - like destroying equipment, physically preventing voters from coming in, intimidating voters, etc. - can be prosecuted (though often aren't, see Black Panters ). Others - like publishing jokes and memes - shouldn't. When there is prosecution, the actual occurrence of the crime - i.e. specific people prevented from voting in a manner that violates their rights (i.e., for example, not convinced to not vote) should be proven beyond reasonable doubt.
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I don't see any reason to take this claim by the prosecution at face value. All they know is that 4900 numbers texted that number. How many actual individuals does that represent? How many of them are registered voters somewhere in the United States? It's trivially easy for anyone anywhere to get basically unlimited phone numbers in any area code. Did any of them refrain from voting conventionally because they actually believed that this was a way to vote? Were any of those people actually aware of the correct way to vote? Have any of them successfully voted in any election in the past? As far as I know, the prosecution did not make any attempt to prove that even one actual person who was registered to vote and plausibly would have voted correctly genuinely believed that this was a correct way to vote and did it instead of voting correctly.
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This isn't 4900 lost votes in NY, this is 4900 people who texted the number, total. The case has nothing to do with NY. They charged Ricky there because electronic cables under NY might have carried the tweets he sent.
That isn't what this is. They aren't charging FBI officials who lied about Russian interference with Hunter Biden's laptop. They aren't even charging other posters who made text-to-vote memes. This is selected and targeted. They used a statute that has never been enforced before to invent a new crime to charge someone for posting memes online. Illegitimate.
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