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Back in August 20 people were arrested in Florida as part of a sting operation on "voter fraud" heavily publicized by Gov. DeSantis. Each person had a felony conviction and voted, but I wrote about how each person was specifically told by election authorities that they were legally able to vote. The confusion stems from how felony voter right restoration was implemented in Florida, where the state insisted that everyone had to pay all outstanding fines while at the same time admitting it had no way of keeping track of all these fines.
A small update since then is that bodyworn video footage of the arrests has been released. The language in an arrest warrant issued by a court usually says something along the lines of "To every peace officer of blah blah, you are commanded to..." which means the decision to arrest is not discretionary. I've watched thousands of arrest videos by now and while the modal arrest is far less eventful that what the typical viral incident would have you believe, it's still an event that is inherently antagonistic. After all, the cop is placing handcuffs on you and taking you to jail, with serious retribution if you impede the process in any way.
I have never seen cops anywhere near as apologetic about an arrest as in the videos just released from Florida. They caught these people unaware outside of their homes, and as they explain the arrest warrant they pepper every sentence with "sir" and "m'am". When they explain that they're about to be handcuffed, they use "unfortunately" as a prefix. Thanks to qualified immunity along with the general deference courts give law enforcement, each cop would have had the legal authority to leg sweep each person and slam them to the ground if they displayed anything that could remotely be construed as resistance. Instead they take the time to calmly explain the process, including when they would likely be released, in a bid to secure as much of their cooperation as possible through what is understandably a distressing event for any person to go through. They're treated with astounding compassion. The people arrested start talking (of course they do), with one explaining how he was told he could legally vote, and the cop responds with "there's your defense". I've never seen a cop highlight legal defenses to the person they just arrested.
DeSantis is a Yale/Harvard educated former federal prosecutor. I would assume based on his background that he's not an idiot, and that he knows how criminal prosecutions work. If I keep my cynic hat on, DeSantis chose to make a big show of these arrests entirely as a means to appease the portion of the electorate that still believes the 2020 election was stolen and remains angry no one has gotten punished. But even so, what exactly was the follow-up supposed to be? Whatever charges one would levy against these people would require that you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they knew they weren't allowed to vote but voted anyway, and how would any prosecutor counter the fact that election authorities approved their registration? What this does also just brings more attention to the confusing labyrinthian mess around court fines the state of Florida intentionally created as a hurdle for felons pursuing voter right restoration.
If the cops conducting the arrest are expressing this much skepticism about the charges, you can surmise how a random jury pool would react. These charges were patently frivolous from the very start but setting that aside they don't even make sense from the political grandstanding perspective. Bewildering.
Think on the meta level just a bit. As in, not about whether these twenty people themselves were or were not intentionally trying to commit a crime, and catching them is proof of anything.
From a pure signalling standpoint, if you want to prevent people from knowingly casting illegal votes and demonstrate that you are capable of enforcing this rule (i.e. detecting illegal votes), then yes, you have to arrest people who do cast illegal votes, even if they possess a defense for the action.
Especially since "I was told it was legal to cast my vote" is such an easy defense to invoke and hard to disprove otherwise. You show that you will STILL investigate such situations and try to verify the defense as valid.
Do you think that this action will, on the margins, increase or decrease the chances of someone attempting actual voter fraud in the 2022 elections in Florida?
Or would the effect be entirely minimal and worth disregarding?
Speaking purely from the political grandstanding perspective, it mostly makes DeSantis look silly and buffoonish: at the margin, it lost him votes, possibly even in future Republican primaries. You can talk about hypothetical second-order effects on marginal illegal voters all you want, but the public doesn't care, and it'll be hard to convince anyone that this escapade was DeSantis courageously trying to institute good policy despite any negative effects it might have on his grander political ambitions.
Find me a single likely voter who was actually swayed from voting for Desantis due to this action, I'll give you the point. Honest.
I doubt Desantis needs many extra votes given how he's got approximately zero chance of losing his re-election bid this year, though.
But if OTHER races end up being close, and he can dissuade fraudulent votes from being cast, well that is a serious benefit to people besides him.
HENCE: The Meta level analysis.
Desantis seems to actually care not just about looking good and winning his own elections, he seems to care about establishing systems which will, over a longer term, support his allies and thus increase the chances his goals will be achieved in the future.
Looking buffoonish for a month is a fine trade if you can bump your party's electoral chances by a few percentage points in the next election and every election to come.
If I can find a single felon who was considering casting a fraudulent vote who is now dissuaded, it would be strong evidence that the tactic worked.
There are two implicit assumptions buried in your analysis, though:
Voter fraud disproportionately favors DeSantis's opponents, and
The fraud is of such a scope to have an effect on an election
To the first point, there's no real evidence that this would be the case. I looked at cases of what I call "casual voter fraud" from the 2020 election in Pennsylvania. By Casual Voter Fraud I mean things like ineligible voting, impersonation at the polls, and mail-in or absentee ballot fraud; in other words, the kind of voter fraud a normal person could attempt without much difficulty. There are other cases of voter fraud, but these all either involved insiders or were part of large schemes that involved a certain amount of organization. Out of five total cases four involved registered Republicans and one didn't specify the party affiliation of the defendant. Given the small sample size, I'm going to conclude that there's no conclusive evidence that deterring voter fraud would help DeSantis's party in any way.
To the second point, again, I point to the small sample size, and to the fact that the incidents in question were distributed throughout the state. If they were concentrated in one area then it's conceivable that five votes could impact some local election, but that simply wasn't the case. More importantly, though, it speaks volumes that DeSantis is making this point by arresting people whom he knows are unlikely to be convicted. If he wants to send a message about voter fraud, then why not have a mass arrest of people who actually committed voter fraud? I understand that maybe it's a difficult thing to catch, but Pennsylvania managed to catch five people in a single election without really trying (there was no statewide crackdown and the only case that got even got significant news coverage was one that Fetterman memed about). Florida is larger than Pennsylvania and if you go back to the start of the Statute of Limitations it shouldn't be too hard to come up with 20 cases of real voter fraud if you were to actually try.
So Desantis wins an extremely close election and other races came down to a bare handful of votes, including one that an opponent won.
Any and all irregular activity in that year's election came out of two counties, both of which are extremely populous and both of which are controlled by his political opponents.
THEN an audit of one such county finds massive problems that could have been exploited for fraudulent purposes.
What, exactly, is the conclusion he should draw from this?
Nikki Fried (D) won by 6000 votes in 2018. 8 million were cast. As noted above.
Many local races were probably even closer than that.
At what point does it become concerning enough that a single corrupt election official might be able to tip races their preferred direction? At what point are you allowed to say "I don't know the exact risk that voter fraud occurs, but I do think that the outcome of fraud can be massive enough to take it seriously."
I just want to know the thresholds YOU think should apply.
I mean, one possible answer is that if they identified persons who they suspect committed voter fraud en masse, they've got them under surveillance, and if they attempt voter fraud again in 2022, they will gather evidence, identify all parties involved, then roll the whole thing up at once.
This tactic is used commonly against other sorts of organized crime, so I find it plausible.
My official prediction is that such mass arrests won't occur due to actual voter fraud in 2022, so this would in fact surprise me if true, but it's an easy way to explain the evidence we have.
Yeah, twenty people in total. Guy's not loading up train cars with his political enemies or anything.
Indeed, I suspect you'd be making even MORE of a fuss if he had arrested public officials who were suspected of voter fraud activities because THAT action, rounding up and arresting officials from the opposing party, looks particularly despotic. It is even just possible that he had grounds to go after, e.g. Palm Beach or Broward County's election supervisors for something like that, but opted to let them resign instead
So in my view, he's actually chosen the nicest way possible to send the message, without kicking in doors or interfering with his political opponent's rights, that the state is ready, willing, and able to detect and prosecute voter fraud.
In the early days of the War on Drugs, most police departments just arrested low-level dealers on the theory that that would be enough to curb the flow. Even the DEA, a group that now almost exclusively focus on the highest of the high-level drug dealers, spent most of the 1970s busting hippies for small amounts of weed. What you're doing here is pointing to things like corrupt election officials and other high-level forms of fraud and suggesting that a show of force against people whom you yourself agree aren't really guilty will somehow act as a deterrent.
I think deterrence works.
The degree to which it works can vary. But on the margins, enforcing laws harshly will incentivize people to obey those laws (or move their disobedience underground, i.e. with guns and drugs).
One of the several reasons we see rampant shoplifting in San Francisco is because they stopped enforcing shoplifting laws.
I don't want these twenty guys to end up in jail.
I'm simply OBSERVING that making a public show of arresting the guys is likely to have a deterrent effect. I think the goal is NOT to punish these guys, who likely had no real impact on any electoral outcome. I think the goal is to deter fraud in the next election.
If you have a better idea on how to dissuade potential fraud in an upcoming election, please proffer it.
This is an extremely low-cost way to possibly prevent the issue.
I think that this makes the action much easier to understand, so HOPEFULLY people can stop claiming to be 'bewildered' why Desantis does this.
Deterrence of what? If the problem in San Francisco wasn't shoplifting but truck hijacking, do you think cracking down on shoplifting by busting a few people who weren't shoplifting but didn't have proper receipts would have any effect on truck hijacking?
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You need multiple people. To stuff a ballot box in a precinct, you would need at least an accomplice stuffing the books, which are explicitly in the control of another person.
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That's not really what this is directed at, though. This is people voting in spite of not actually being allowed to. Felons, indigents, flavors of immigrants. Most of those categories seem likely to favor Democrats. It makes me think of the 2008 Minnesota Senate race, which ended up being decided by 225 votes. It was later determined that something like 1000 felons illegally voted in overwhelmingly Democrat counties. That result sent Al Franken to Washington, and gave Obama the 60th vote for the ACA.
Indigents? Is that a typo? Indigents obviously are allowed to vote.
Looking it up, I actually misunderstood the meaning of the word. I had the impression there was a strong subtext of homelessness + mobility, and thus would include people who were not in the municipality/county/state in which they were actually registered to vote.
do you mean 'transient'?
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Next time, include a source for the claim? I dug it up -
I read the wikipedia article, an incredibly boring use of 5 minutes of time (and reading the sources was worse...), and it ends with
"On March 31, the court issued an order to count at most 400 rejected absentee ballots and denied any other relief.[88][89] On April 7, the court scrutinized those ballots and determined that 351 had been legally cast. Those votes were counted, with 111 going to Coleman, 198 to Franken, and 42 to others, giving Franken a final margin of 312 votes.[90]"
You seem to refer to "In July 2010, Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, conducted a study in which it flagged 2,803 voters in the Senate race for examination, including 1,359 it suspected to be ineligible convicted felons in the largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul area.[110][111] Subsequent investigations of Minnesota Majority's claims by election officials found that many of its allegations were incorrect. Some of the cases that were submitted involved mistaking a legal voter for a felon with the same name, others involved felons who had had their voting rights reinstated after serving their sentences, and others were felons who illegally registered to vote but did not vote in 2008 election.[112][113][114] Ramsey County officials narrowed their investigation to 180 cases, while Hennepin County examined 216 cases.[115]"
From the first source (fox news):
Added up, that's 342, which is slightly higher than 312. (although even if we believe that, if even 5% of the felons voted R, 342*.9 < 312). (although you could just as well argue plenty of the nonconclusive matches were 'real' too, whatever)
The star tribune confirms the 312 number, 'Ever since Franken won by a mere 312 votes', and
Unless most of those were confirmed, that still puts us under 312.
And (from kare11):
Those who are being charged with two felonies are felons who registered at the polling place on election day and voted, leaving no time for a cross-check with lists of convicts still on probation "We're going to continue to investigate 180 other complaints but we're not talking about a huge number of actual cases. And of that 30 about half of them were registration only, they didn't actually vote."
If we assume that cuts half of the 180 + 216, that puts us well under 312.
On the other hand, of course, dropping an investigation may be because it's impossible to prove, not because it didn't happen.
But
So - at a guess, these particular voters didn't tip it, but ... who knows.
However - these are right-wing claims. Did some R voters vote illegitimately, tipping the election rightwards? Idk, but from the wikipedia article, there were a number of recounts where both sides challenged vote counts, absentee ballot validity, et cetera - and in each of those, franken ended up with more extra votes than his opponent.
Obviously, both sides are very willing to play hard in the legal system, fighting tooth and nail, and care about the 'facts' only tangentially', and, more visibly so in more local races, sometimes commit outright fraud.
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That doesn't change the point at all - if that happens at all (and it does), then arrest people who are knowingly breaking the law, instead of people who were told they could vote!
Do you at least see the issue that arises when you arrest people who have cast illegal votes AFTER the elections in question have already been called?
Why you'd really, really prefer to have these votes not cast in the first place?
And how, in your mind, should one go about preventing potential fraudulent voters from casting votes?
What might, lets say, deter them from doing so?
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Why? I was always told that ignorance of the law is not an excuse, and there isn't even evidence he was told he can vote.
Right, exactly. "I called the IRS and they told me to do this" does not get you out of being penalized for violating tax law, for example.
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First, "ignorance of the law is no excuse" is a reference to what the law requires. OP is talking about prosecutorial discretion.
Second, the law requires that the defendant act willfully and "[a]s a general matter, when used in the criminal context, a 'willful' act is one undertaken with a 'bad purpose.' In other words, in order to establish a 'willful' violation of a statute, 'the Government must prove that the defendant acted with knowledge that his conduct was unlawful.'" Bryan v. United States, 524 US 184, 191-192 (1998). It says "as a general matter," so perhaps the voting law is an exception.
And, of course, advice of counsel is a defense to some crimes, which is another example of an exception to the ignorance of the law rule.
Edit. Btw the law applies only to those who vote knowing they are not qualified
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Depends on the wording of the law. From what @ymeshkout was saying above I surmise that this law specifies that it's only "fraud" if you know you're not eligible and vote anyway.
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Right, and scaring the shit out of anyone with a felony record about even thinking about voting (even if they are legally allowed to) is likely to have a beneficial effect for the Republican party's election chances. Do you disagree?
I would broaden it to "scare the shit out of anyone who was thinking of trying to fraudulently influence the election" at all.
This is a flex which shows "we can detect illegal votes and we WILL investigate illegal votes. Risk it at your peril."
My prediction is that there will be little fraud in the 2022 Florida elections. I DONT know how much occurred in prior elections. But there won't be much this time.
You keep dodging the question. People are going to jail because they believed bogus information given to them by the government. Do you or do you not support those prosecutions? If you do, can you explain exactly how prosecuting people for believing the government advances any causes?
I think that these guys should not be sent to jail.
I think if they can demonstrate that they were told that they were legally permitted to vote, and voted while under this belief, they should have their cases dropped.
Further, I think they should each sue the state of Florida for the hassle this imposed and other damages based on the theory of Malicious Prosecution.
I'd guess somewhere on the range of $10k to $25k would be appropriate damages.
So assuming all twenty were to sue, and all twenty were to win, and all twenty were to receive $25k, then the state of Florida should pay out that $500,000 to them immediately.
Or, in other terms pay out .002% of Florida's budget surplus
And that seems quite a worthwhile expenditure to avoid any major electoral fiascos in 2022.
It's apparently ok to file charges against people who are likely innocent because then they might sue the people who are actually responsible for this situation and then maybe those settlements will encourage better behavior from the government...you do see how convoluted that is, right?
The guy DeSantis picked to run Office of Election Crimes and Security explicitly told local election officials this wasn't their fault. It's the state government that is in charge of parsing through all the relevant records and giving a final answer to local officials. If this is an issue worth putting people in jail over why isn't DeSantis prosecuting his own administration officials? There's an obvious conflict of interest here, which I would think would severely undercut the idea that DeSantis' was acting in good faith when he chose to make a spectacle of these random people's arrests. I've explained what I believe DeSantis is doing — he's prosecuting these people to scare the hell out of any felon from even thinking about getting their voting rights reinstated, to appease his supporters who still believe in delusional election fraud theories, and also to distract from the problems his own government has in implementing Amendment 4 — and you haven't disavowed me of those beliefs. What do you think I'm missing?
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If only there was a voter role system that was actually kept up to date, such that these cases would be resolved weeks in advance, and any questionable points dealt with before the election... some kind of registry to vote, such as parties and most nations have...
But one party systematically refuses to allow either voter ID laws, or any securing of the voter registry... leaving effectively an honor system for voting in America. Well if you're going to leave it unsecure enough we're trusting felons' word as to whether or not they're entitled to vote, then there has to be consequences for being wrong.
You could have secure elections where none of these people would be able to vote at all unless it was explicitly signed off by an authority that they had cleared their felony restriction... instead you're taking them at their word, now its just down to whether there are consequences when you prove their word is wrong.
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I worked elections in Canada in another life... there was no way for anything like the regular "Mistakes" that happen in the American system because of all the ID and paperwork you are required to show and clerks required to document.
Somehow you missed the part where the government told these people they could vote, and you somehow also missed how Florida intentionally decided to implement restoration requirements everyone knew was going to be a mess. It might be useful for you to at least skim through the litigation that explained the problems. Here's an excerpt from pg 53:
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This wasn't an issue of ID, and these people were registered. That's why we have advocates saying things like:
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As a Republican, I agree that keeping criminals out of elections will disproportionately help my side.
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