We’re pretty sure voters don’t need this kind of help.
Urban Outfitters, the sellers of tragically hip clothing for teens and millennials, tweeted out an election guide for voters on Monday.
It started off fine, reminding people when the election will be and telling them how to find their polling place.
Then it kind of went off the rails.
The guide said voters need a “voter’s registration card” for their state in order to vote. That’s not true. No state requires voters to present their voter registration card before voting.
It also said would-be voters would need to bring their ID with them to the polls. But identification (with or without a photo) for voting is only required in a handful of states.
On Election Day, Urban Outfitters corrected the errors.
“We have updated the blog post to make sure it’s accurate,” a spokesperson said. “This blog post was written by a member of our content team who made a mistake in researching the voting requirements. When this error was brought to our attention, we immediately updated the post to not only correct the information but also included an additional link for state-by-state voter ID requirements for readers to reference. We are deeply sorry for any confusion this error may have caused. In the future, we will be installing more stringent fact-checking procedures to ensure these types of error do not happen.”
Vote by text?
Urban Outfitters’ error seems like an honest mistake, but there are other instances where people were clearly trying to mislead others as Campaign 2016 winds down.
For awhile on Twitter there was a barrage of fake ads, targeting Hillary Clinton supporters, saying it would be possible to vote by sending a text message (For the record, you can’t).
One add encourages Clinton supporters to “Save time. Avoid the lines. Vote from home.”
“Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925 and we’ll make history together,” reads another, which has a “Paid for by Hillary for President” stamp at the bottom.
Twitter has suspended some of the accounts associated with the ads, a company spokesman told CNN.
