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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.
I think we’re forgetting the possibility that government officials of large red states think it a political necessity to come up with something to prosecute as voter fraud.
Texas is promising to prosecute a suspected case of ballot harvesting in tarrant county(and unlike in Florida, it might amount to anything in court, even if it wouldn’t have changed the result of the election). I think Arizona is doing something too.
I agree with this. I linked to when I last wrote about this issue:
Seems kind of suspicious that voter fraud is supposedly vanishingly rare but when the media picks some guy at random he's committing voting fraud.
I don't want to gloss over the distinction here. What Hervis Rogers did was cast a vote when he was not legally allowed to, even though his registration went through without issue. Calling this a case of "voter fraud" does not make sense to me, because fraud implies deception. It's perfectly possible that Rogers somehow purposefully hoodwinked the local election board to accept his voter registration despite knowing he was still not eligible, but what's more likely is that Texas does not have a good system in place to accurately keep track of people's convictions across the 472 district court jurisdictions in the state. This on its own is not surprising, because judicial record systems are a hot mess.
I think it's reasonable to use Rogers' specific case to draw attention to the government's record-keeping practices and to what extent their systems jeopardize election integrity (if you believe felons voting two months before their 14 year probation term ends is a problem). It's also reasonable to opine and investigate to what extent poor record-keeping can facilitate fraud. But neither is the same as claiming fraud actually happened.
He also voted in 2018.
The guy was a career criminal. Nothing about his life up to that point makes me think he cared about following the rules. I guess it's possible he didn't know he was still on probation, I doubt it though. I think he just didn't consider the possibility that he would get caught or that anyone would care.
Either way the result is the same: the party that opposes any investigations into voter fraud gets another vote that they weren't legally entitled to.
@ymeskhout
Kinda off topic, but I find it really weird that felons can't vote in the US. I remember being very confused when I learned about this (recently). Seems like a bad thing, especially given stupidly high incarceration rate. Apparently almost 2.5% of the population was disenfranchised at the peak (2016). Seems to be potentially enough to shift the outcomes of the elections.
So, say, some political group takes power, passes laws which disproportionately affect people voting for the other side, lots of people go to jail... and they're stripped of the right to vote.
Seems like a really stupid idea. Probably popular tho.
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