” Oh no ! Robert Simpson, a resident of the small town of Pahokee, north of Miami, is adamant. This year he will not vote in the midterm elections. Because, for having done it the last time, he had to pay the price.
The 68-year-old man is indeed one of the twenty Floridians arrested last August – the vast majority of whom are African Americans – by the “election police” put in place by the Republican governor of the state, Ron DeSantis, to ensure the security and integrity of the election. Highly publicized, the operation, the first of its kind carried out by the new team in charge of investigating electoral fraud, took place across the state. She left behind citizens stunned by their arrest and images of arrests in broad daylight in front of their neighbors who are now circulating online.
“Yes, I have committed a crime in the past [c’était en 1992] “, admits Mr. Simpson met by The duty last Friday in a modest residential area, in the middle of farmland and houses competing in simplicity and disorder. “But I served my sentence. »
After years of a strict lifelong exclusion from the electoral process of people convicted of a crime, Florida in 2018 restored their right to vote, once their sentence has been served. Exceptions exist however, if the ex-prisoner still has unpaid fines (for vagrancy, for speeding…) or legal fees that he would have “forgotten”. The measure mainly discriminates against people with low incomes, from the African-American community, denounce civil rights defenders here.
“Three years ago, I went to the voter registration office,” continues Mr. Simpson. Nobody told me that I didn’t have the right to vote. They even gave me my card. I voted in 2020. And today, more than two years after my registration, I am arrested. Why ? »
Why ? The question arises, in Florida, as in several pivotal states where, since the start of the electoral campaign, cases of voter intimidation have multiplied, fueled by the conviction within the radical fringe of the Republican Party that the last presidential election was the subject of massive fraud that brought Joe Biden to power. Despite hundreds of court challenges to the results and recounts, including many overseen by Republicans, there is no evidence to support the charges. Including in Florida.
Invectives and firearms
Last week, the Arizona Department of Justice received four new complaints of harassment of voters near polling stations in the greater Phoenix area – where Republicans are fighting hard to slow down the Democratic progress revealed during the 2020 presidential election. This brings to 10 the number of intimidation cases filed with the office of the attorney general of this southern state since the beginning of the fall. The complaints refer to invectives against voters who come to cast their ballots by citizen vigilantes seeking to “protect”, according to them, the exercise of democracy from a fraud of the existence of which they have been convinced. . Donald Trump has continued his attacks from the Democratic camp on this theme – in contradiction to the facts – since his defeat. This “big lie” is taken up in chorus by several Republican candidates currently in the electoral race.
Voters have been filmed, photographed, accused of being “undercover agents” in the service of the said fraud. Weapons were also exhibited near the polls.
In Colorado, a group called the US Election Integrity Plan has trained volunteers, some of whom are armed, to go door to door looking for voter fraud. They knocked out 10,000 voters. In Georgia, activist groups staged massive, baseless challenges to the eligibility of tens of thousands of voters, reports the Brennan Center for Justice.
“Voter intimidation has been part of American elections for a long time, summarized in an interview with the To have topolitical scientist David Bateman, joined at Cornell University in New York State. But it had diminished after the 1960s. In 1980, the Republican Party even passed an executive order legally prohibiting certain practices interpreted as intimidation. But it was rendered obsolete under the Trump administration. And things have gotten even worse since the 2020 election, when Trump’s lies about voter fraud encouraged the coordination of groups to “surveil” polling places — not just by trained observers, as has always been the case. case for both parties, but by people who decided in advance that fraud was going to happen and that they were going to prevent it. »
Targeted elected officials
This political violence also reached a climax last Friday with the hammer attack on the husband of the majority leader in Congress, Nancy Pelosi, in the middle of the night in his residence in San Francisco. According to the local police, it is not an “indiscriminate act” of violence, the assailant, a man in his forties, having subscribed to conspiracy theories and hate speech uttered against the country’s democratic elites on several social networks. The gesture was unanimously condemned by the Democrats – just like by a handful of Republicans – who underlined in passing the toxicity of the political space during the current election.
In Florida, on October 21, a Miami judge dismissed the charges of electoral fraud brought against one of the twenty people arrested by the “election police” of Ron DeSantis. Robert Simpson’s case could follow the same path in the coming days, with Miami-Dade District Judge Milton Hirsch having established that there was no “organized attempt” at fraud and that the citizens targeted by this campaign, having been duly registered, did not know that they were voting in violation of the law. Florida law states that a voter must “willfully” commit the crime of illegally registering and voting to be prosecuted.
A total of 1.4 million Floridians are affected by the 2018 Restoration of Voting Rights to Persons with Criminal Pasts Act, according to the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which brings together lawyers seeking to help them regain their place. in the exercise of democracy.
“I am at peace with what happened, assures Robert Simpson, in a calm and composed tone. When we look at the history of Florida, we understand that they have always tried to prevent us, in one way or another, from voting. I hope I will regain my right to vote. Not this year, that’s for sure. But for the next election, no doubt. And I’m not going to vote for them. »
This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund.The duty.