Poltical dirty tricks to defraud voters is not protected speech.
I have to seriously question the intelligence of voters who might be sucked in by such a joke and believe it was a serious announcement of an alternate voting method.
First, that anyone might have believed it outright for their lack of knowledge of how things work, and second for them not doing their (ridiculously small amount of necessary) due diligence and realizing it was a joke. We're talking about voting age adults, here, not fourth graders.
Keep in mind, this is pre-COVID and before all the ridiculous schemes cooked up thereby to stuff ballot boxes, and even then, this one would have been discarded, or the market for burner phones would have gone through the roof during the election. (Stuffing ballot boxes, double counting, and software tricks are likely far cheaper and easier means to cheat.)
Now the question arises: Do you actually have to have brass bands and streaming banners telling people something is a joke?, or can we at any point reasonably rely on the discretion of the voting age audience to discern what is real and what is satire or proferred in jest?
Their ignorance (or the projected ignorance of the FLEA/judicial community) is all that stands between a few laughs and a Felony charge. God forbid you share the joke with friends who in turn share it, because that might lead to the destruction of "Democracy". Whatta "conspiracy"!!
(We know leftists have no sense of humor, and ridicule remains one of the best ways to beat them, maybe that's why they are attacking memes and those who share them now.)
If that doesn't put a damper on free speech, what does?