Election cops turn confusion into hyped-up voter fraud

Unwitting, hapless and confused aren’t the usual attributes associated with criminal defendants worthy of a gubernatorial press conference.

We expect a governor’s designated villains to evince, well, villainy. Not pity.

The 18 woeful ex-felons busted last month — the first arrests by Florida’s Office of Election Crimes and Security — hardly seemed the stuff of a crime-busting governor’s big show. Not to mention the inconvenient likelihood that the charges won’t stick.

Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the arrests in Fort Lauderdale Aug. 18 with a ballyhoo one might expect after the round-up of international arms smugglers. (DeSantis was flanked by 15 BSO deputies, insurance against a mob of election fraud desperadoes storming the dais, no doubt.)

DeSantis said 20 ex-felons with murder or sex offense convictions that disqualified them from voting in Florida have been charged with election fraud. (Two have yet to be arrested.) “They will pay the price,” he promised.

But maybe not. Reporters from the Guardian, NPR, the Miami Herald, Tampa Bay Times, Politico and other news media discovered that most, perhaps all, of the 20 election fraud cases lack a necessary element for criminal conviction: willful intent.

The defendants did indeed vote in 2020. But apparently after they had been issued voter registration cards by their respective county election supervisors. They mistakenly assumed their status had been altered by the 2018 constitutional amendment that restored the voting rights of ex-felons. (Excepting those convicted of murder or sex crimes.)

Several defendants said local election officials or voter registration canvassers had assured them that they could legally vote.

Their cases mirrored the illegal voting charges faced by six convicted sex offenders earlier this year in Lake County. However, the Lake County State Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute, stating: “In all of the instances where sex offenders voted, each appear to have been encouraged to vote by various mailings and misinformation. Each was given voter registration cards which would lead one to believe they could legally vote in the election. The evidence fails to show willful actions on a part of these individuals.”

The problem is less about criminality than confusion. Law professors, much less uneducated ex-felons, can’t fathom the legal and administrative mess Tallahassee created after

64.5% of the voters approved the 2018 amendment.

Lawmakers so muddled the implementing legislation that the federal judiciary is still trying to sort it out. “Inattention or shoddy craftsmanship,” U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle complained, referring to a provision requiring ex-felons to pay all court costs, fines and restitution before registering to vote. Except the state has yet to create a database that tracks who still owes and how much.

“The flaws in Florida’s approach are especially egregious because a person who claims a right to vote and turns out to be wrong may face criminal prosecution,” Hinkle wrote in

2020.

Two years later, the process remains baffling. Just last week, the governor claimed that county election supervisors were responsible for keeping ineligible felons off the voter rolls. Which contradicted former Secretary of State Laurel Lee, a DeSantis appointee, who said in 2019 that determining voter eligibility was in her office’s purview, but she needed more money to create an efficient vetting system.

Instead, the legislature allocated $2,076,814 in March to fund an election security office with 15 fulltime investigators.

Five months later, those 15 fulltime investigators have discovered a grand total of 20 errant voters. (To be fair, the $2.2 million Election Fraud Unit in Texas, another state hot to validate Donald Trump’s allegations about crooked elections, closed just three cases last year.)

The day after the DeSantis press conference, Republican state Sen. Jeff Brandes, who wrote the statute cited in the voter fraud arrests, tweeted that “it was our intent that those ineligible would be granted some grace by the state if they registered without intent to commit voter fraud.”

Another bothersome question dogs this notion of criminal intent: Why would any of these poor chumps knowingly risk another stint in a Florida hellhole prison just to cast a single vote — a single vote in a state where the right is so unappreciated that 75% of the eligible voters ignored the Aug. 23 election?

Meanwhile, perhaps exhausted by their months-long pursuit of pitiful ex-felons, investigators with the Office of Election Crimes and Security have shown scant interest discovering how FPL money found its way to ghost candidates and shady political operatives who were very, very intent on subverting Florida elections.

But rich, powerful and politically connected are not attributes associated with the class of criminals likely to be targeted by the Florida Office of Election Crimes and Security.