pretending to be black

I just came across this beautiful example of misleading without technically lying. Sleazebag politician Dave Wilson sent out flyers with pictures of black people saying "please vote for our friend and neighbor", and said he was endorsed by Ron Wilson. You hear the name Ron Wilson, you think of a prominent black politician. But he meant his white no-name cousin. Successfully having convinced people that he's black, he won the election, in the actual world, in 2013.

The juxtaposition of the pictures with the text is actually technically a lie, I would argue. It depends on spelling out the conventions for juxtaposing pictures with text, but the referent of "our" simply must be the people in the picture. There is no other possible reading. So I believe that the pamphlet logically implies that the candidate is the "friend and neighbor" of the people in the picture, which is false. But obviously we need to work out clear rules for juxtaposing pictures so I can see how he could get away with claiming that it's not a lie.

Now for the "Ron Wilson" thing.  First of all, saying you're endorsed by someone is not relevant to the Question Under Discussion (does this person stand for your values?) unless that person is a political figure. That's one way he misled people into thinking that he was referring to the black political figure. And using a name of a famous person in a public pamphlet to refer to your no-name cousin is obviously going to make people think you're referring to the famous person, because a proper name obviously refers to the most salient individual with the name. I bet if they asked people who they thought "Ron Wilson" was referring to, the only answer that people would come up with would be the famous black politician, so it's not even remotely ambiguous in this context.

Yet technically the "Ron Wilson" thing is not lying, I would say. One might reasonably feel that this level of misleadingness ought to be illegal though. How would one craft the law? One way to put it might be in terms of ambiguity: If your statement (slash juxtaposition of pictures with text) unambiguously implies something false, then it's illegal. And you could somehow run experiments or use theoretical arguments to show that the false thing is unambiguously implied.