While the issue of mail-in voting and the potential for widespread fraud was at least temporarily out of the news headlines over the past several days due to the extended coverage of President Donald Trump’s battle with Covid-19, make no mistake — the issue is still very real.
According to Fox News, over the weekend a voter in Florida who claims he only wanted to “test the system” found himself in legal hot water after he requested a mail-in ballot for his wife, Ursula — a woman who died years ago.
The 62-year-old registered Democrat, Larry Wiggins, was arrested after local election officials discovered not only that the ballot request was for a deceased, registered voter, but that the handwriting on the ballot looked quite similar to the handwriting on Wiggins’ ballot.
Mike Bennett, the Manatee County Supervisor of Elections said that he team discovered the fraudulent request because their voter database is often updated to show which voters in the county are deceased since the last election.
Wiggins attempted to clarify the situation to a local news outlet, claiming he only sent in his deceased wife’s ballot out of curiosity.
“I said well, ‘Let me just send it in and see what’s going to happen to see if they’re actually going to send a ballot for her to vote,” Wiggins said.
He then attempted to justify his curiosity by pointing out that this kind of thing happens all over the country, which made him believe that he wasn’t doing anything serious enough to land him in jail. “I heard so much about ballots being sent in and people just having found them in different places. I feel like I haven’t done anything wrong,” Wiggins added.
While Wiggins isn’t wrong about this kind of fraud happening around the country, what he obviously wasn’t aware of is the fact that it can put a person in serious legal jeopardy. Voter fraud in the state of Florida — along with many other states — can land a convicted person in jail for up to five years.
But as Bennett pointed out, Wiggins’ attempt to test the system worked.
