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Example: [Collected via email, November 2015] Origins: On 28 November 2015, the Gateway Pundit published an article about Robert Lewis Dear, the man accused of opening fire at a Planned Parenthood, and how he allegedly identified himself as a woman on his voter's registration. While The Gateway Pundit simply reported that Dear was registered as a woman on his voter's registration (they even uncovered the document as proof), other conservative outlets that picked up the story asserted that Dear was cross gender: The rumor reached a much wider audience when Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz repeated the claim to reporters in Iowa: While it's true that Dear's gender was marked female on his voter registration, he was not born a woman. Ryan Parsell, El Paso County's chief deputy clerk and recorder, explained that a clerk had incorrectly marked down female for Dear's Gender and that he had attempted to fix the error:The Clerk and Recorder's Office processes over 500,000 transactions a year, Parsell said. Mistakes are going to be made, and it is a reminder to us of the important job that we do to see that a mistake made by us has had national implications. Our employee inadvertently clicked on 'female' and gave the confirmation to Mr. Dear to review, he said. He missed it and signed it. Thirteen days later, Dear received the erroneous driver's license in the mail. Records show he traveled to a Department of Motor Vehicles office in Salida to report the error and request a corrected license, which he received, Parsell said. While Dear was able to correct his gender on his driver's licence, he failed to do so on his voter registration. When Dear sent in a form to correct the gender on his voter registration, a clerk rejected it because the mark on male was so faint that it wasn't clear if it was intentional:No correction was made, however, because the marking was so faint that a deputy clerk concluded it wasn't intentional, said Park County Clerk and Recorder Debra Green. Green described the marking as a small dark spot that doesn't completely fill the box next to male. She just looked at it and she was like, 'Did the pen hit there? Did the mail put a mark through there when it went to the Post Office?' It's just not clear to either one of us what the intent was. Green noted that Dear voted twice using the voter registration card - once in November 2014 and again this fall. Parsell said that his office made similar errors during the same time period, chalking them up to heavy workloads and antiquated systems. If there's a mark in the male portion of that card, taking it in totality, I think it's safe to assume at this point it was probably an attempt to change his gender on the voter registration form. The claim that Dear was a liberal is unsupported by his voter's registration, in which he was listed as unaffiliated as of October 2014. It should also be noted that while Ted Cruz did use the term transgender leftist activist while referring to Dear, his campaign spokesman Rick Tyler later clarified that the presidential hopeful was illustrating how little we really know about Dear and his motives:
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