Florida election crimes office dealt with 1,300 complaints, continues to stir controversy

TALLAHASSEE – The elections investigations office launched by Gov. Ron DeSantis, which has sparked controversy and outrage among many voter rights groups, is reporting it received over 1,300 complaints of elections misdeeds over the past year.

The Office of Election Crimes and Security’s 336-page annual report to the Legislature, released this week, shows that while dozens of complaints have been dismissed, the bulk of them are still in some category of review or investigation.

The overwhelming majority of the complaints involve accusations of someone either trying to register, or actually voting, illegally.

“Enforcing Florida election law has the primary effect of punishing violators, but enforcement also and equally as important acts as a deterrent for those who may consider voting illegally or committing other election related crimes,” the report says.

But the office, created in 2022 and drawing $1.4 million in taxpayer funding, continues to be a lightning rod, in part because of the cases it pursues.

As cases pursued, controversy followed

Last fall, charges were dropped in Tallahassee against a 69-year-old woman arrested at her home at 3 a.m. for illegally voting in the 2020 and 2022 elections.

Marsha Ervin had successfully registered to vote and was sent a government-issued registration card even though she was still on probation for felony charges and had not regained her voting rights.

Cecile Scoon, co-president of the League of Women Voters of Florida, said the Election Crimes and Security office has too frequently focused its firepower at minority voters.

“The state is seeking out some people for prosecution,” Scoon said. “There is a definite pattern going on where enforcement seems to be only in one direction.”

In its first major action shortly after being created, the office assisted law enforcement in conducting mostly early morning raids that resulted in the arrests of 20 former felons – just days before the August 2022 primary elections –for having illegally voted two years earlier.

Most of those arrested were Black and had received government voter identification cards. The majority of the cases were later dismissed or resulted in plea deals with no jail time.

Office was proposed when DeSantis was allied with Trump

DeSantis proposed the office early in 2022 when he was still allied with former President Donald Trump, whose repeated falsehoods about the 2020 election being stolen continue to animate the Republican voting base.

DeSantis is now a Trump rival for this year’s Republican presidential nomination, having finished a far distant second to the former president in Monday’s Iowa caucuses. But with another election looming, the state Election Crimes and Security office is certain to take center stage again.

Along with the 1,339 complaints it investigated in the past year, the office also said it dealt with hundreds of emails and more than 800 phone calls to its Voter Fraud Hotline.

The office still is recovering from the loss of its first director, Pete Antonacci, a longtime Florida government figure who died suddenly in fall 2022 during a meeting in the governor’s executive office suite at the Capitol.

Some critics see the Election Crimes and Security office as used by DeSantis to blunt political participation in communities that may lean Democratic.

DeSantis uses office to send a message, analyst says

“It does send a message,” said Abdelilah Skhir, a policy strategist with the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

“In addition to arresting those people who had genuine confusion around their voting status, it also chilled turnout. I heard from many folks who had been knocking on doors and talking to voters, and many people chose not to vote if they had any doubt about their eligibility,” Skhir added.

The Florida Constitution’s Amendment 4, approved by voters in 2018, can restore voting rights to most offenders, except those convicted of murder and felony sex crimes.

But a statutory requirement that all fees, fines and court costs be fully paid has led to confusion over eligibility, since no central database exists that allows offenders to check their status.

DeSantis and the Republican-controlled Legislature have not actively called for creating any such system. But in the new report, the Election Crimes and Security office does touch on many of the cases it was involved in last year.

A scattering of cases; usually low-level offenders

Among them was the arrest and conviction of 10 Alachua County Jail inmates who registered and cast ballots in 2020, again stemming from confusion about their eligibility status following Amendment 4.

A “ghost” candidate in an Osceola County commission race was convicted of campaign violations in a scheme to siphon-off Hispanic votes to help another candidate retain her seat.

A Sumter County man in The Villages was convicted of fraud for completing his late-father-in-law's vote-by-mail ballot in the 2020 elections.

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The office also touted having helped yield “multiple five-figure fines” against a third-party voter registration organization, Hard Knocks Strategies LLC, for election law violations, including for falsifying at least 58 voter registration applications in Lee and Charlotte counties.

A scattering of other cases cited in the annual report include the convictions of several people for illegally registering to vote or for casting more than one ballot in an election.

Office taking a wary look at signature campaigns

With high-profile petition campaigns underway seeking voter signatures for abortion rights and recreational marijuana ballot measures for November, the Election Crimes and Security office also pointed to its oversight of this area of elections law.

DeSantis and Florida’s Republican legislative leaders oppose these ballot measure, which would create amendments to the state's constitution. And the office’s annual report casts an ominous cloud, generally, over signature campaigns.

The office said that it had reviewed and referred to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement cases involving 32 petition gatherers in the last quarter of 2023 suspected of forging or duplicating signatures on forms.

In its report, the office concluded, “this is the tip of the iceberg with respect to the fraudulent activities taking place with constitutional initiative petitions.”

John Kennedy is a reporter in the USA TODAY Network’s Florida Capital Bureau. He can be reached at jkennedy2@gannett.com, or on Twitter at @JKennedyReport.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Florida election police handled 1,300 complaints, annual report shows