The Guardian reports that many of the (ultimately 19, not 20) people who were targeted by the governor’s brown shirt brigade had been told or led to believe—by elections officials or other state-sanctioned officials—that they were indeed qualified to vote. In many of the cases, they issued a voter registration card and had no issues at all voting, so they were entirely gobsmacked to find out they had broken any law.
Court documents show that many of the defendants caught in this pretend sting claim to have very real reasons for believing they were not breaking the law when they voted in 2020. -- One of the voters charged, Douglas Oliver, a 59-year-old Black man in Tampa, was convicted of a sex crime in 2001, which made him ineligible to vote in Florida. He told the Guardian that he had not thought about voting until a canvasser approached him one day at a store and encouraged him to register in 2020. Oliver said he disclosed his felony conviction, and the canvasser said he was eligible. After submitting a registration application, he got a registration card from his local election office in Hillsborough county.
Here’s another story from the court documents: Michelle Stribling, a 52-year-old Black woman from Eatonville convicted in 1993 of second degree murder, told investigators during an Aug. 5 interview at her house that she “could not read or write very well,” and did not understand questions related to her status as an ex-felon on registration paperwork. But Orange County election officials mailed her a voter card after she registered, which led her to believe she was able to vote.
DeSantis, of course, didn’t hold a press conference when discussing actual bad actors in Republican strongholds who admitted to doing things like “voting twice.” DeSantis also forgot to mention that many of the people they arrested were not informed they were ineligible to vote until this year—nearly two years after they allegedly voted illegally...
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