'How? What?' Body camera footage of 3 a.m. Florida voter fraud arrest shows confusion

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was published hours before news broke that the state attorney was dropping the charges against Marsha Ervin. Read that story here.

The knock came at 2:47 a.m.

It took more than a minute for 69-year-old Marsha Ervin to wake up and open her apartment door, tired and confused, to see two Tallahassee Police Department officers standing beside the welcome mat.

“Hey, Ms. Ervin, so here’s what's going on: You do have warrants for your arrest,” an officer explained as he stepped inside and handcuffed her.

"For what?" said Ervin.

"For fraud."

"For fraud? When?"

An investigation opened a while ago, he told Ervin as he tightened the cuffs, but the arrest warrants came two days before.

"It is for fraud," he went on to say. "And [the warrant] was dropped by FDLE, which is the Florida Department of Law Enforcement."

"Fraud?" Ervin asked. "How? What?"

It was for voter fraud, more specifically.

"I don't know why this..." she said to herself in the back of the police car.

The scene was caught in police body and vehicle camera footage obtained by the USA TODAY Network - Florida. It shows the moment in the early morning of Sept. 29 that Ervin became one of the dozens of Floridians to get arrested following voter eligibility confusion.

That moment — a Black woman, in her pajamas and slippers, handcuffed then eased into a police car — has galvanized the support of a nationally-renowned civil rights attorney and a multitude of advocacy groups. They accuse Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration of voter intimidation, and they're elevating a not-new call for the state to fix the confusion instead of arresting people for it.

What led to the moment

In August 2022, DeSantis announced a batch of arrests of people who voted despite having previous murder or sexual offenses. Most of those arrested were Black, were issued voter registration cards and said they thought they were eligible to vote.

The Tampa Bay Times obtained body camera footage of some of the arrests, with the voters displaying a confusion similar to Ervin's. One man, handcuffed, asked: “Voter fraud? Y’all said anybody with a felony could vote, man.”

Voting rights advocates say the arrests scared many eligible voters from the polls — especially those with prior convictions and in communities of color. DeSantis, now a far-right and far-behind candidate in the 2024 presidential race, went on to win the 2022 election by historic margins.

A month before he did so, a FDLE investigator contacted Ervin. The department had received information about her from DeSantis' recently-created Office of Election Crimes and Security, which investigates voter fraud allegations.

She'd been convicted of aggravated neglect of an elderly person in 2016 and released from prison in 2018, and was put on a probation scheduled to end this November. Until then, she wasn't eligible to vote. Her Leon County Democratic voter registration had been nixed following her conviction.

But Ervin re-registered, again as a Democrat, in 2020. The government gave her a voter registration card. She proceeded to cast a ballot in that year's general election and the 2022 primary.

She told the investigator she thought she could vote. She wouldn't have voted otherwise, especially having just been released from prison, she explained.

Ervin thought the end of her conversation with the investigator marked the end of the investigation, according to her attorney. She thought the state, which gave her the voter registration card, would understand she had no intention of risking running afoul of its laws again.

A year passed, and then the police came.

"She was reliving a nightmare that she had lived five years ago, because she voted," said Mutaqee Akbar, the attorney and who's also the Tallahassee NAACP president, at a press conference last week.

Many of the people supporting Ervin at the press conference have tried for years to get the state to do more to alleviate voter confusion. They say the onus should be on the state to get it right, and the state should create a system for voters to easily be able to determine their eligibility without legal consequences.

"They gave her a voter registration card," said renowned civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is also representing Ervin, in an interview after the press conference. "Wouldn't you believe you had the right to vote if they gave you a voter registration card?"

Florida Department of State spokesperson Mark Ard said in an email that "an individual in the middle of serving a Florida felony probationary sentence very clearly has not completed the terms of his or her sentence."

Confusion over who can can vote goes back to 2018, when voters approved Amendment 4, which aimed to restore voting rights to 1.4 million people barred because of past felony convictions.

Months later, the Legislature passed a bill signed into law by DeSantis to keep hundreds of thousands of felons from becoming eligible to vote until they met all their past legal financial obligations.

The amendment never allowed those with felony murder and sex offenses, just as it never allowed people to vote before completing a felony probation. Still, people are confused about how the laws apply to them.

And, under Florida statute, the onus is on the voter to get it right. Voter fraud is a felony offense, as Ervin is intimately aware.

Press conference held on Ervin's arrest: Civil rights leaders, advocacy groups join defense of Florida woman accused of voter fraud

More details on the 3 a.m. arrest: A 69-year-old Floridian thought she was eligible to vote. Then police came knocking at 3 a.m.

More on Ervin's 3 a.m. arrest

Ervin wasn't the only one woken up by the officers. She shares the apartment with her adult son and daughter.

"What's going on?" her son asked, as Ervin stood handcuffed in the living room.

"I know it's weird we're in here, you were just sleeping... I'm going to explain everything to you," the officer said.

He told him about the warrants but there was no mention of voter fraud.

"I don't know any specifics of the case at all, OK? It just came across our table."

The son asked why Ervin hadn't been notified earlier. Sometimes, people with warrants are allowed to turn themselves in, or are informed by their probation officer.

"I don't know how they tried to inform her or anything like that, because it's not my department that did it," the officer said.

FDLE didn't respond to a media request about why that didn't happen for Ervin. But a spokesperson previously emphasized to the USA TODAY Network - Florida that the department "has no control over when or how a warrant is served."

While Akbar said police were polite to Ervin — the arresting officer stopped the car at one point to make sure her handcuffs weren't too tight, and made sure she had airflow in the backseat — the hour of her arrest has created outcry.

"They came to Ms. Marsha's house at three o' clock in the morning like thieves in the night," Crump said.

Legal expert: 'There's probably some better times to serve a warrant on a nonviolent 69-year-old woman'

Aaron Wayt, the legislative chair of the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said it wasn't uncommon to see arrests at such an hour.

"That doesn't mean it's right," said Wayt, a Tallahassee defense attorney, in an interview. "A lot of police serve these warrants at nighttime when people are asleep, when people are expected to be home... It is common, but I'd say there's probably some better times to serve a warrant on a nonviolent 69-year-old woman."

Since the warrants were signed days before, he said there were "multiple points" police could've made such an arrest.

TPD Deputy Chief Tonja Bryant-Smith said at a Tallahassee City Commission meeting last week that officers can't be selective with the timing of arrests or they'd face accusations of bias. She said officers make arrests when they come across someone with a warrant or while searching for people with warrants on their downtime.

TPD spokesperson Alicia Hill said the arrest was the result of an officer "proactively searching for wanted people."

"Officers work all times of the day and night," she wrote in an email. "During times when there are not calls for service officers are expected to conduct proactive policing activity which includes locating and arresting wanted individuals in their area of responsibility."

Akbar said the timing of the arrest was "residual" to a bigger issue.

"The bigger issue is nobody should be getting arrested for these cases when they're confused," Akbar said. "The purpose of it, as a whole, is so felons, even those who have finished their conditions, will fear to go out and vote. The confusion is on the state... When there's obvious confusion it seem like it's entrapment or some type of set up by our government."

This reporting content is supported by a partnership with Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners. USA Today Network-Florida First Amendment reporter Douglas Soule is based in Tallahassee, Fla. He can be reached at DSoule@gannett.com. Twitter: @DouglasSoule. Elena Barrera can be reached at ebarrera@tallahassee.com. Follow her on Twitter @elenabarreraaa.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Police camera shows confusion in latest Florida voter fraud arrest