Apparently, if you’re a white Republican who clumsily commits voter fraud in America, you get a slap on the wrist. Maybe a kiss, too. And possibly even a corsage—assuming Donald Trump thinks you’re hot enough to be seen in public with him.
You’ll recall last year when four residents of The Villages—a GOP redoubt in the fever swamps of Florida and the largest retirement community in the world—were accused of committing in-person voter fraud of the sort that’s vanishingly rare everywhere in the U.S. but The Villages, apparently.
Well, they’ve all now copped to the crime, and it appears that cheating in elections isn’t a big deal when you’re on the white side—erm, right side—of history. John Rider, a 62-year-old Villages resident, recently admitted to his crime as part of a pretrial intervention program that will conveniently keep him out of prison, where he might have encountered one or two individuals with marginally less zeal for Dear Leader than he has.
His sentence? Fifty hours of community service. But apparently the community work was not to his liking—probably something like ladling out soup in a homeless shelter instead of squeegeeing the Adderall-and-Yoo-hoo paste off Trump’s heaving bosom at 4 AM each day, which is what he really longed to do—so he’s planning to “buy out” the 50 hours at $10 per hour. So, yeah, a $500 fine for real-ass intentional voter fraud.
Meanwhile, those of us in the consensus reality community are forced to white-knuckle our way through a barrage of fake fraud accusations while our ship of state continues to list starboard toward fascism. I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’ve been punished more than $500 worth just by Mike Lindell. (Though he paid a good portion of that back on Tuesday night, to be fair.)
The three other Villages residents who were caught up in the anti-fraud dragnet entered into similar pretrial agreements last year. Unfortunately, their wrists aren’t any ruddier than Rider’s. Their slaps were so light, their run-in with the justice system seemed more like a tickle fight than a prosecution.
WKMG-TV, Orlando:
All four were facing a maximum of five years in prison if a jury convicted them of a third-degree felony.
As part of their agreements with the state, Joan Halstead, Charles Barnes and Jay Ketcik were required to complete a 12-week adult civics class based on the textbook “We the People; the Citizen and the Constitution.”
Under the pretrial intervention contracts, prosecution of the defendants will be deferred for a period of 18 months, with the possibility that it will be permanently deferred if they successfully complete the court-ordered requirements.
As much as I’d like to see every American who voted for Donald Trump be forced to take a civics class—of course, my curriculum would be based on the textbook Oh, Jesus Christ, Are You Fucking Serious? This Guy?—educating them three at a time probably won't achieve the critical mass we need to save our democracy.
Meanwhile, as Steve Benen points out at the MaddowBlog, this is just more of the same for the numerous Trumpian scofflaws who were caught tiny-orange-handed.
It was in May 2021 when we learned about Pennsylvania’s Bruce Bartman, who cast an absentee ballot in support of Trump for his mother — who died in 2008. Bartman pleaded guilty to unlawful voting, conceded he had “listened to too much propaganda,” and was sentenced to five years’ probation.
About a month later, Edward Snodgrass, a local Republican official in Ohio, admitted to forging his dead father’s signature on an absentee ballot and then voting again as himself. NBC News noted at the time that Snodgrass struck a deal with prosecutors and was sentenced to three days in jail and a $500 fine.
[…]
Nevada’s Donald Kirk Hartle, meanwhile, became a cause célèbre in Republican circles when he said someone cast a ballot for his late wife. In November 2021, we later learned that it was Hartle who illegally voted for his late wife, lied about it, got caught, and ultimately pleaded guilty. As part of a plea deal, he received a yearlong probation.
And that’s not all! You’ll find more examples here, here, and here.
Also, as Benen points out, the sentences doled out to Trumpies who knowingly committed voter fraud—perhaps because Trump told them to—stand in stark contrast to that of Crystal Mason, who mistakenly thought she was eligible to vote and cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 election. She got five years for the crime of, uh, accidentally voting while being Black.
After discovering she was not on the voter roll, Mason submitted a provisional ballot in that year’s presidential election on the advice of a poll worker. Because she was still on supervised release for a federal tax fraud conviction, she was not eligible to participate in elections and her vote was rejected. Throughout the case, Mason has said she had no idea she was ineligible to vote under Texas law and wouldn’t have knowingly risked her freedom. But Tarrant County prosecutors pressed forward with charges, arguing Mason’s case came down to intent.
A trial court judge convicted her of illegally voting, a second-degree state felony, relying on an affidavit Mason signed before casting her provisional ballot. The affidavit required individuals to swear that “if a felon, I have completed all my punishment including any term of incarceration, parole, supervision, period of probation, or I have been pardoned.” Mason said she did not read that side of the paper.
To be fair, Mason’s case is currently being reconsidered by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, six years after she cast her vote—which, by the way, was never counted.
Speaking of Florida, you probably already know what Gov. Ron DeSantis is doing there in his ongoing quest to make Black and poor people scared of voting. (Hey, he has to prove he’s crueler, more arbitrary, and more racist than Donald Trump, which is a really big lift. After all, he desperately wants to be president so he can turn the rest of the country into Florida, which I assume would feel a little like your plastic surgeon trying to graft your scrotum over your entire body in order to heal your sunburn.)
Body cam footage released last week by The Tampa Bay Times and The Miami Herald depicts arrests made by local police in August of Florida residents who voted in the 2020 presidential election while allegedly ineligible. The arrests were made on orders from Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new Office of Election Crimes and Security—also known as his election police.
The footage is disturbing. It is clear that the individuals, arrested in and around Tampa, have absolutely no idea that they have done anything wrong and why they are being detained. At moments, their confusion and distress are so pronounced that the police arresting them try to console them. As The Tampa Bay Times put it, the police are “almost apologetic” for their actions.
The person who should be apologizing to them is DeSantis. It is the Florida governor and his legislative allies, in their attempts to create barriers to voting in the state, who have created a system so dysfunctional and intentionally confusing that it does not allow many thousands of Floridians to confidently know whether they are legally eligible to vote. Now some of those people are facing third-degree felony charges, with the possibility of up to five years in prison, solely for attempting to participate in the democratic process.
Ah, I see. The folks DeSantis sent the gendarmes after made two fatal mistakes. They didn’t knowingly try to scam the system, and they (presumably, anyway) didn’t vote for Donald Trump.
They won’t make that same mistake again. Neither, I assume, will John Rider. Five hundred dollars buys a lot of Trumpy Bears, after all. And We the People; the Citizen and the Constitution is like a John Adams roundhouse kick to the head. Or so I’ve heard.
See? All’s well. Nothing to see here. You can sleep easy tonight as you lay your tender, callow head on your MyPillow. The American justice system is on the case.
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.