Voter fraud charges dropped against 69-year-old Florida woman arrested at 3 a.m.

The charges have been dropped for the 69-year-old Tallahassee woman who was arrested at 3 a.m. last month for alleged voter fraud.

Marsha Ervin's attorneys were alerted Tuesday afternoon by a filing from State Attorney Jack Campbell, whose 2nd Judicial Circuit office handled her case. She was one of dozens in Florida to get arrested following voter eligibility confusion.

"While there was sufficient probable cause for arrest, subsequent information has compromised the State’s ability to proceed further," Campbell wrote.

Campbell wrote that the decision was made after speaking with “two key witnesses.”

One was to Leon County Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley, who said he believed that Ervin registering to vote even while she wasn’t eligible was an "innocent mistake."

“Apparently, there is a group that sends persons like Ms. Ervin forms indicating how they can re-register to vote,” Campbell wrote. “These forms appearance is such that many would believe them to be coming from the Supervisor of Elections Office. The Defendant’s application seems to be one of these forms.”

Another "key witness" was Ervin’s probation officer, who provided Campbell’s office with two forms that reviewed the conditions of probation with Ervin.

One was signed in October 2022 and explicitly explains that the offender could not legally vote while on probation, according to the filing. The other was signed in November 2018 and doesn't show this language.

“The voting incidents were between these two dates and there is no indication that she has voted since being provided this information,” Campbell wrote.

Ervin had 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.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement got information about this from Gov. Ron DeSantis' recently-created Office of Election Crimes and Security. Ervin told an FDLE investigator she thought she could vote. She wouldn't have voted otherwise, especially having just been released from prison, she explained.

A year after interviewing Ervin, FDLE signed warrants for her arrest anyway.

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Ervin feels 'excitement and relief'

Mutaqee Akbar, her attorney and the Tallahassee NAACP president, applauded the decision. Ervin’s reaction, he said, was one of “excitement and relief."

“That’s justice,” he said. “I appreciate Jack Campbell [dropping the charges], doing whatever investigation that he needed to do in order to do it, especially in a time where we have a governor who dismisses and removes prosecutors for not following the governor’s rules.”

Akbar's referring to the controversial ousting of state attorneys Monique Worrell and Andrew Warren.

“I understand the courage that it took for Jack Campbell to do it, but I think [he] made the right decision in doing so,” he said.

Florida Department of State spokesperson Mark Ard previously 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."

Campbell said he did what he thought was right.

"One of the key things that our system requires me to do is to make case decisions, charging decisions, purely on the law and the evidence," he told the USA TODAY NETWORK - Florida.

"Of course, I don't want anything bad to happen to me or my family or my career," he said. "As far as letting that dissuade me in any way, no, I'm not concerned about that. I have no reason to believe that anybody's going to take action. And even if I did, I'm still going to do what I think is right every time, because that's what my job demands."

His office declined to take up voter fraud cases in the past, but had accepted this one because of Ervin being on probation.

"With Ms. Ervin, it seemed like a much clearer case, because she was on active probation," Campbell said.

But then he spoke with Ervin's probation officer and Earley, the local supervisor of elections.

"If I've got the supervisor of elections who believes that she didn't commit fraud, and he's far more an expert than I on elections, I just don't think I can proceed in good faith and prosecute her for fraud."

Campbell said the group that had sent Ervin voting information was a national one that mails forms to people getting out of prison and those formerly convicted of felonies.

Confusion over who can can vote in Florida 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.

Her charges were dropped on the same day that the USA TODAY NETWORK - Florida released body and vehicle camera footage of Ervin's early morning arrest by the Tallahassee Police Department.

The knock came at at 2:47 a.m. on Sept. 29. It took more than a minute for Ervin to wake up and open her apartment door, tired and confused, to see two TPD 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?"

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

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.”

The cases of others recently arrested for voter fraud have had inconsistent outcomes, with some yet to be resolved.

In response to some cases getting dismissed, DeSantis signed a hastily-passed bill from a February special session making it easier for statewide prosecutors to go after election crimes.

At the time, a governor's office spokesperson said that legislation "helps ensure that those who set out to undermine our democracy by illegally voting in Florida face legal consequences."

FDLE and the Department of State did not immediately respond to a media request about the charges being dropped.

While the governor's office also didn't immediately respond, it's already been on the offensive about Ervin's arrest.

DeSantis' Deputy Press Secretary Alex Lanfranconi wrote a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, criticizing a USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida story about it.

"I’m sorry her sleep was disturbed," he said, including a screenshot of an article about her 2015 charges. "She served time for neglecting her own mother in horrific conditions. Then after prison she voted illegally."

Ervin told police that she was the primary caretaker for her mother, 86-year-old mother Gloria Bourgeois, but that Bourgeois refused to see a doctor due to her religious beliefs.

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.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Florida voter fraud case dropped against 69-year-old arrested at 3 a.m.