San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Election police unit announces vote fraud cases
Seven weeks after Florida’s state government opened a new office of election crimes and security, Gov. Ron DeSantis said 17 people had been charged with casting illegal ballots in the 2020 election, in which 11.1 million Floridians voted.
The governor called the arrests “a first salvo” in a longoverdue crackdown on voting crimes. Critics called the announcement a publicity stunt that said less about voter fraud than about holes in the state’s election security apparatus that had allowed the violations to occur in the first place.
DeSantis, who is seeking re-election this year and is widely considered to be running an unannounced campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has made action against voter fraud a centerpiece of his tenure as governor. He offered crucial backing last year to legislation tightening the rules for registering to vote and casting ballots. The state Legislature allotted $1.1 million for his 15person election crimes office after he proposed its creation late last year.
But while the specter of widespread fraud has become a staple of Republican political rhetoric, there is no evidence that election crimes are a serious problem in Florida or anywhere else in the nation. There and elsewhere, most violations appear to involve people who ran afoul of laws that restrict voting by former felons, or people who cast two ballots, usually in separate states where they spend different parts of the year.
Experts say that many of those violations appear to be inadvertent. The 17 people charged Thursday were all felons, convicted of murder or sex offenses, who were barred by law from casting ballots. All but one were men, and all but two were in their 50s or older.
Casting an ineligible ballot is a felony punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment and up to $5,000 in fines. “That was against the law, and now they’re going to pay for it,” DeSantis said last week.
The governor said more arrests were forthcoming, and suggested that they would include so-called double voters and noncitizens who cast illegal ballots — another offense that experts say is frequently the result of confusion about voting rules.
He added that a paucity of voting fraud prosecutions in recent years reflects a lack of enforcement, not a lack of fraud.
A group that advocates restoring voting rights to former felons said none of the 17 people arrested would have faced charges had the state not allowed them to register and vote, despite their ineligibility.