A case alleging election fraud that was the first of its kind from a new state prosecution team to actually go to trial ended last week in a partial acquittal. The defendant, a man named Nathan Hart, was facing two felony charges in relation to his disputed conduct, and the jury convicted him of a charge and acquitted Hart on the other.
Multiple other cases originating with the same team, championed by Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis, have encountered procedural hurdles in judges concluding that the state prosecutors didn’t have the needed jurisdictional power to challenge behavior they hadn’t sufficiently proven took place across local jurisdictions and not only in one. An individual who, in the course of registering to vote, never actually left or got in direct communication with someone outside their county didn’t necessarily commit acts across counties just because state authorities in Tallahassee processed the information on their application. In this case, Hart — who was among nearly two dozen charged for engaging in the electoral process despite past convictions on felony charges that left them with restrictions — rejected multiple offers of a deal, insisting on his innocence.
The jury found Hart guilty of a crime called false affirmation and not guilty of voting as an unqualified elector. As in other cases among those pursued by DeSantis’s state team, it’s simply unclear Hart had specific and knowing intent to violate the law. One woman who was among those charged said she was assisted in filling out her application for voter registration by staff with a county government office, and Hart claimed he was approached by someone outside a similar office, who pushed him to register and reassured him about potential consequences, although it’s unclear whether there is much if any specific documentation of this claimed interaction. It sounds like some kind of voter registration drive in the wake of Florida approving an amendment to the state Constitution that allowed for some convicted of felony offenses to regain their voting rights, excluding certain individuals who committed violent crimes or sex offenses.
Hart will be sentenced towards the end of this month. Prosecutors apparently aren’t seeking any time in jail; instead, their request is five years of probation. The defense push for sentencing is time served. The entire trial lasted only a day, with the verdict returned that same day. (It was this past Tuesday.)
Despite any efforts to hype up the idea of prosecuting those allegedly guilty of fraud around elections, the simple fact remains that such fraud is rare, and in the U.S., the kind of systematic fraud that Trump claims is present does not exist. As in other cases that have emerged from DeSantis’s push, it appears there is a significant, even if not systematic, gap in the legal framework in Florida for authorities themselves to check the information on voter registration applications. Instead of focusing more attention there, to fix the problem of authorities sending voter registration cards sometimes when someone technically ineligible seeks to register, the DeSantis team seems more interested in pushing a narrative.
