A Government Official Helped Them Register. Now They've Been Charged With Voter Fraud.

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:

ProPublica
@propublica
·
Follow
New: Ten Florida men with felony convictions have been charged with voter fraud because prosecutors say they registered and voted illegally. Critics say the punishments are unfair.

propublica.org
A Government Official Helped Them Register. Now They’ve Been Charged With Voter Fraud.
Ten Florida men with felony convictions have been charged with voter fraud because prosecutors say they registered and voted illegally. Critics say the punishments are unfair.
8:02 AM · Jul 21, 2022

https://www.propublica.org/article/florida-felonies-voter-fraud

His last night as a prisoner in North Florida, Kelvin Bolton couldn’t sleep. Fifty-five years old, with a wispy goatee the same color as the gray flecks in his hair, he was about to get out after serving a 2 1/2-year sentence for theft and battery. The last time he’d seen his brothers and sisters at a big family gathering, he’d marched onto the dance floor ostentatiously, turned away and wrapped his arms around himself to caress his own back. As he swayed goofily to the music, everybody laughed.

Now Bolton was so close to being free and seeing his family again. The next morning, a bright Wednesday in April, he was already dressed in his street clothes and cleared to go when the woman processing his paperwork stopped him.

“The lady said, ‘Hold on, you can’t go anywhere,’” Bolton remembered in a recent phone call.

Confused, he asked her what was going on, he recalled. There was a warrant out for his arrest for incidents in 2020, she explained gruffly. But that was impossible. He’d been in jail at the time, awaiting his prison stint.

Guards loaded Bolton into a van, then drove an hour and a half south to deposit him in Alachua County Jail.

There, he found out what he’d done wrong.

He’d voted.

*snip*

[radical noodle]

1. No word at all about

what's happened to the people in The Villages who voted twice for trump, though.

[halfulglas]

2. But voting twice is really different.

Because only Republicans seem to do that, and that's deliberate. Mistakenly voting must be the crime in Florida.

[radical noodle]

3. I strongly suspect that if the double voters

had voted for Democrats, it would be all over the news.

[halfulglas]

6. Yep. The same thing with some of the other states when Republicans were caught.

Like the guy who used his son's (or father's) name to vote twice for the former guy. Crickets as to any serious repercussions. Certainly not charged with felony.

[scarletlib]

4. According to the article they were sentenced to 50 hours of community service & attending some

Sort of additional training. I guess its about voting legally.

[halfulglas]

5. Maybe they even served wine and snacks during the "training."

[scarletlib]

8. Would not be surprised.

[gratuitous]

7. Florida is sending a message to its citizens

Voting could put you at risk of losing life, liberty or property. Is it really worth it? You can't trust what elections officials tell you about your eligibility to vote. You can't trust what the courts tell you about whether all your fines and court costs have been paid (they don't know themselves). And if you, in good faith and with no ill intent, cast a ballot that someone in the government determines was wrongly cast, you're on your way back to jail.

See, if rich people or well-connected people do something that looks kinda sorta illegal, and that gives them a huge financial benefit, prosecutors have convinced themselves that they have to show that the well-connected person intended to commit a crime or defraud their mark or whatever they did. But poor people, ex-cons, any living on the edge, can be convicted of a crime they had taken affirmative steps to avoid committing. And prosecutors will press for the maximum sentence as an example to anyone else who might be getting some uppity ideas about participating in democracy.