January 5, 2022 ☼ florida ☼ villages ☼ fraud ☼ election-2020 ☼ gop
Source: The Washington Post (Link)
So it’s fitting that the Villages should now be the epicenter of a small outbreak of America’s second-most-commonly detected affliction: voter fraud.
On Tuesday, a resident of the Villages, Charles Barnes, was arrested for allegedly having voted more than once in the 2020 election. It was the fourth such arrest in the past month; in December, three others were arrested for having allegedly committed the same crime. In each case, the person is accused of having cast ballots from Florida but also other states where they had residences, including Michigan, New York and Connecticut. Three of the four were registered Republicans at the time of the election.
This, of course, is what voter fraud usually looks like: isolated examples of individuals casting more than one ballot. For all of former president Donald Trump’s sweeping allegations of rampant fraud mechanisms at play in myriad states to benefit Democrats, there’s not only no evidence that such conspiracies were undertaken but what we do know about the scattershot incidents in which illegal votes may have been cast suggests that it’s a bipartisan problem. In the modern political era, there are only rare examples of systematic efforts to swing elections with incidents of fraud far more often being a function of what appears to have happened in Florida.