In August, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that the state of Florida was arresting 20 people who had knowingly registered and voted illegally in the 2020 elections. He said these arrests were “just the first step” in his attempt to crackdown on alleged wide-scale voter fraud in the state, despite the fact that there is no evidence to prove voter fraud is a major concern in the state.
Those snared that day weren’t plotters of some large-scale election rigging scheme: Most of the people arrested had previously been convicted of murder or felony sex offenses in Florida, which makes them automatically ineligible to vote there even after they’ve completed their sentences, probations, and paid other court-related fees.
Last week the Tampa Bay Times released body-camera footage recorded by local police as they made a few arrests. It caused an uproar. The videos showed arrests of arrestees reacting with genuine shock and confusion at the charges. The police themselves also seem confused and even sympathetic at times.
The big question the video itself and the negative reaction to it presents is: If these people were not allowed to vote in the first place, why were they being held to account when the state failed to do accurate background checks?
“Why would you let me vote if I wasn’t able to vote?” asked Tony Patterson, one of the people getting arrested on video.
According to Lawrence Mower, the Tallahassee correspondent for the Tampa Bay Times and the Miami Herald who first obtained the footage of the arrests, it’s because the laws around who has eligibility to vote in Florida are extremely confusing and have been since 2018. Mower spoke to Vox’s Sean Rameswaram earlier this week for an episode of Today, Explained — Vox’s daily news explainer podcast — about the arrests, and DeSantis’s motivation for kick-starting the program that led to them.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so download Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
Sean Rameswaram
What was the thought process behind releasing the video of these arrests?
Lawrence Mower
We put this out there thinking that this is different. You know, witnessing these people get arrested for voting is just not something you see every day. You look at someone like Romona Oliver, a 55-year-old woman, spent 18 years in prison for second-degree murder. She’s got a job. She’s been remarried since leaving prison. She’s arrested on her way to work. She looks like a grandma.
In another case of Tony Patterson, a guy who’s a registered sex offender. He’s stopped outside of his house and police tell him you’ve got a warrant for your arrest. And he says, “What for?” You can see from the video that he can’t really believe it. There’s another telling video, a guy by the name of Nathan Har. He was given a voter ID card even though he was not allowed to vote. The state did an initial check and cleared him and he voted in 2020. The office arresting him even tells him that his story sounds like a loophole.
Sean Rameswaram
You also write that police seem sympathetic toward the people getting arrested.
Lawrence Mower
Yeah, that’s pretty extraordinary. It’s not every day that you hear a police officer lending advice on a sex offender’s defense while they’re arresting that person. So local police seem maybe skeptical or almost sympathetic to these people’s situations here. It’s not the kind of typical perception you have here when you hear “murderers and sex offenders.”
[Editor’s note: You can hear clips of the reactions being described in the Today, Explained episode or watch the videos here on the Tampa Bay Times’s website.]
Sean Rameswaram
What is it about the reactions in the videos that causes shock?
Lawrence Mower
These people’s reactions challenge the laws that they’re being accused of violating. They’re being accused of willfully violating the law, willfully voting when they were ineligible. And I mean, just look at the video. Does it seem like these people knew that they were violating the law at the time? I think there’s probably a real question there for a lot of people, perhaps even a jury, whether or not these people, you know, seemed to have willfully violated the law.
Sean Rameswaram
To understand what’s going on in these videos, you have to understand Florida’s Amendment 4. Can you remind us what that amendment did?
Lawrence Mower
It allowed anyone with a felony conviction to vote. If you did not have a felony sex offense on your record, if you did not have a murder on your record, and if you had completed all terms of your sentence. You know, Amendment 4, when it passed [via ballot initiative in 2018], was considered the greatest expansion of democracy in the United States since the civil rights movement. We’re talking up to 1.4 million people in Florida, presumably getting the right to vote back.
Sean Rameswaram
Governor DeSantis comes into office in 2019. What’s his relationship to Amendment 4?
Lawrence Mower
He was against the amendment, like most of the top Republicans were here. And DeSantis encouraged the legislature to draw a very hard line on the fines and fees issue. He’s the one who really pushed the legislature to require people with felony convictions to pay off all fines and fees and restitution to victims before being allowed to vote.
So DeSantis sets up a new office to investigate voter fraud, right?
Lawrence Mower
The Office of Election Crimes and Security was something that DeSantis requested from the legislature in 2021. This is a first-of-its-kind office, and these were some of the concerns that some in the legislature had when this office was created. They were wondering — how is this office going to be used? Because this is putting quite a bit of power into a politician’s hands.
Sean Rameswaram
Okay, and I imagine this office is how we get to these arrests?
Lawrence Mower
In August, DeSantis held a press conference to announce the first actions by the Office of Election Crimes and Security. He announces 20 people getting arrested. It’s no debate. They were not allowed to vote, but nevertheless they were given voter ID cards cleared by the secretary of state and were not stopped from going into a polling place and casting a ballot in 2020. Nevertheless, DeSantis announces these arrests, touts that these were the first actions by this new office. You know that these people are going to pay the price.
Sean Rameswaram
So what’s clear is that if you buy that there was widespread election fraud in the 2020 election, so far, arresting 20 people who seem to have been confused about whether or not they had the right to vote isn’t really getting at some larger conspiracy to commit fraud in elections, right?
Lawrence Mower
No, it’s not. You know, DeSantis since 2020 has been under pressure from conservatives in Florida to do an audit of Florida’s 2020 election, which President Trump won handily in Florida. It was a blowout by Florida standards. So it’s kind of no secret from the political class that this was a response to pressure from the right to do something about voter fraud. And these 20 arrests don’t point to any kind of concerted fraud here.
Sean Rameswaram
Right, so what do these arrests actually point to?
Lawrence Mower
It kind of points to faults with DeSantis’s own office, in fact. You know, the basic question here is, why were these people allowed to register to vote in the first place? Why can’t the secretary of state — again, this is DeSantis’s own office — why can’t they still tell you when you register to vote whether or not you’re eligible to vote?
Sean Rameswaram
What is DeSantis after that he will indulge the people who really want to see him police elections this way — when you admit that he doesn’t even seem to really care that much about it?
Lawrence Mower
It’s no secret to anyone in Florida, much less nationally, that DeSantis wants to run for president. And, of course, he’s running for reelection this year. And so this is an issue in which he may be perceived as vulnerable, and it’s something that he has some control over. So he can create an election security force and make arrests, which gets headlines, which makes it look like he’s doing something.
