Maryland man’s fabrication electrified central Ohio
ANNAPOLIS, Md. —It was early fall, and Donald Trump, behind in the polls, seemed to be preparing a rationale in case a winner like him somehow managed to lose. “I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest,” the Republican nominee told a riled-up crowd in Columbus. He was hearing “more and more” about evidence of rigging, he added, leaving the details to his supporters’ imagination.
A few weeks later, Cameron Harris, a new college graduate with a fervent interest in Maryland Republican politics and a need for cash, sat down at the kitchen table in his apartment to fill in the details Trump had left out. In a dubious cyberart just coming into its prime, this bogus story would be his masterpiece.
Harris started by crafting the headline: “BREAKING: ‘Tens of thousands’ of fraudulent Clinton votes found in Ohio warehouse.” It made sense, he figured, to locate this shocking discovery in the very city and state where Trump had highlighted his “rigged” meme.
“I had a theory when I sat down to write it,” recalled Harris, a 23-year-old former college quarterback and fraternity leader. “Given the severe distrust of the media among Trump supporters, anything that parroted Trump’s talking points people would click. Trump was saying ‘rigged election, rigged election.’ People were predisposed to believe Hillary Clinton could not win except by cheating.”
In a raucous election year defined by madeup stories, Harris was a home-grown, selftaught practitioner, a boutique operator with no ties to Russian spy agencies or Macedonian fabrication factories. As Trump takes office this week, the beneficiary of at least a modest electoral boost from a flood of fakery, Harris and his ersatz-news website, ChristianTimesNewspaper. make for an illuminating tale.
Contacted by a reporter who had discovered an electronic clue that revealed his secret authorship of ChristianTimesNewspaper.com, he was wary at first, chagrined to be unmasked.
But eventually he agreed to tell the story of his foray into fake news, a very part-time gig that he calculated paid him about $1,000 an hour in web advertising revenue. He seemed to regard his experience with a combination of guilt about having spread falsehoods and pride at doing it so skillfully.
At his kitchen table that night in September, Harris wondered: Who might have found these fraudulent Clinton ballots? So he invented “Randall Prince, a Columbus-area electrical worker.” This Everyman, a “Trump supporter” whose name hinted at a sort of nobility, had entered a little-used back room at the warehouse and stumbled upon stacked boxes of ballots premarked for Clinton, Harris decided.
“No one really goes in this building. It’s mainly used for short-term storage by a commercial plumber,” Prince said.
A photograph, he thought, would help erase doubts about his yarn. With a quick Google image search for “ballot boxes,” he landed on a shot of a balding fellow standing behind black plastic boxes that helpfully had “Ballot Box” labels.
It was a photo from The Birmingham Mail, showing a British election 3,700 miles from Columbus — but no matter. In the caption, the balding Briton got a new name: “Mr. Prince, shown here, poses with his find, as election officials investigate.”
The article explained that “the Clinton campaign’s likely goal was to slip the fake ballot boxes in with the real ballot boxes when they went to official election judges on November 8th.”
Then Harris added a touch of breathlessness: “This story is still developing,” he wrote, “and CTN will bring you more when we have it.”
He pushed the button and the story was launched on Sept. 30, blazing across the web like some kind of counterfeit comet. “Even before I posted it, I knew it would take off,” Harris recalled.
He was correct. The ballot box story, promoted by a half-dozen Facebook pages Harris had created for the purpose, flew around the web, fueled by indignant comments from people who were certain that Clinton was going to cheat Trump of victory and who welcomed the proof. It was eventually shared with 6 million people, according to CrowdTangle, which tracks web audiences.
The next day, the Franklin County board of elections announced that it was investigating and that the fraud claims appeared to be untrue. Within days, Ohio’s secretary of state, Jon Husted, issued a statement to deny the story.
“A Christian myself, I take offense to reading such unbelievable lies from a publication alleging Christian ties,” Husted said.
There was nothing especially Christian about his efforts, Harris admits; he had simply bought the abandoned web address for $5 at ExpiredDomains.net. Within a few days, the story, which had taken him 15 minutes to concoct, had earned him about $5,000. That was a sizable share of the $22,000 an accounting statement shows he made during the presidential campaign from ads for shoes, hair gel and web design that Google had placed on his site.
Days after the election, denounced for making the peddling of fake news remunerative, Google announced that it would no longer place ads on sites promoting clearly fabricated stories.
A few days later, when Harris checked his site, the ads were gone. He checked with an appraiser and was told the domain was now essentially worthless.