Dealing setbacks to Republican-led voter fraud prosecutions, judges in Florida and Texas this week dropped charges against two former felons who had been accused of casting ballots when they were not eligible to do so because of their status as offenders.
Robert Lee Wood, one of those two felons, was part of an August roundup spearheaded by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, on voter fraud.
On Friday, a circuit court judge in Miami-Dade County granted a motion to dismiss two felony charges related to voter fraud against Mr. Wood, 56, who spent two decades in prison for second-degree murder. Mr. Wood was among the 20 people who were recently arrested in Florida on voter fraud charges and became the first defendant to have them dropped.
And on Monday, a district court judge in Texas set aside the indictment of Hervis Earl Rogers, a Houston man who gained widespread attention for waiting seven hours to vote during the 2020 primary election. Last year, Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general and a Republican, charged Mr. Rogers with voting illegally because he was on parole.
A lack of evidence of widespread voter fraud has not stopped Republicans from aggressively pursuing it in states where they hold power. Now, the unraveling of the two high-profile cases has compromised the legitimacy of those efforts.
Bryan Griffin, a spokesman for Mr. DeSantis, said in an email on Friday that the state disagreed with the dismissal of charges against Mr. Wood and would appeal the ruling.
“The state will continue to enforce the law and ensure that murderers and rapists who are not permitted to vote do not unlawfully do so,” Mr. Griffin said. “Florida will not be a state in which elections are left vulnerable or cheaters unaccountable.”
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The ruling by Judge Milton Hirsch of the 11th Judicial Circuit was limited to jurisdictional issues and not Mr. Wood’s voting status. It said that state prosecutors did not have standing in what was a local criminal proceeding. The prosecutors had tried to argue that they did have jurisdiction, because Mr. Wood’s voter application and ballot were processed in another county.
“Given that elections violations of this nature impact all Florida voters, elections officials, state government, and the integrity of our republic, we continue to view the Florida Office of Statewide Prosecution as the appropriate agency to prosecute these crimes,” Mr. Griffin said.
Larry Davis, a lawyer for Mr. Wood, said in an interview on Friday that his client was approached in the summer of 2020 by a voter drive representative at a Miami-area Walmart asking if he wanted to register to vote.
When Mr. Wood told the person that he was a convicted felon, the person said that a state constitutional amendment had restored voting rights to felons and so he filled out an application, according to Mr. Davis. The amendment, however, excluded people convicted of murder or felony sex offenses and required them to apply separately to have their rights reinstated.
Mr. Wood received a voter card from the state six or seven weeks after filling out the application, said Mr. Davis, who described the dramatic scene when his client was arrested at 6 a.m. in August.
“The house was surrounded with police that had automatic weapons,” Mr. Davis said. “They wouldn’t even let him get dressed and they took him to jail.”
In Florida, a conviction of voter fraud requires proof of intent. Mr. Davis said “there’s absolutely no proof” that his client willfully broke the law.
The legal setback for Mr. DeSantis, who is running for re-election in November and has White House ambitions, came days after the release of body camera footage from law enforcement officers in the Tampa area who carried out similar arrests. In the videos, the people arrested seemed puzzled and appeared to have run afoul of the law out of confusion rather than intent.
Mr. Davis said that he had requested the body camera footage from Mr. Wood’s arrest, but had not yet received it.
In the case of Mr. Rogers in Texas, Judge Lisa Michalk of the 221st District Court in Montgomery County, which is about 40 miles north of Houston, ruled on Monday that Mr. Paxton as Texas’s attorney general did not have the authority to independently prosecute criminal offenses under the Election Code.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Paxton did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.
In a statement, Mr. Rogers expressed his relief that the indictment had been set aside.
“I am thankful that justice has been done,” Mr. Rogers said. “It has been horrible to go through this, and I am so glad my case is over. I look forward to being able to get back to my life.”
Tommy Buser-Clancy, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and one of the lawyers who represented Mr. Rogers, in a statement this week lamented what happened to Mr. Rogers.
“He never should have been prosecuted in the first place, and this ruling allows him to put this traumatic ordeal behind him and move on with his life,” Mr. Buser-Clancy said.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
