(JustPatriots.com) – A Democrat voter from Florida was arrested recently after requesting an absentee ballot for his dead wife. 62-year-old registered Democrat Larry Wiggins’ wife had been dead for two years, and when caught requesting the ballot paper, told authorities that he was only trying to “test the system.”
Yeah, sure. He did.
The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported how the Manatee County Supervisor of Elections, Mike Bennett, spotted a suspicious request on the system. Bennett explained how staff discovered the fraudulent request during a routine check of the state voter rolls, which are hugely out of date in many states across America.
The voter database in Florida, however, is constantly being updated, Bennett said, meaning they caught the request for a dead citizen.
During the investigation of the request, Bennett’s office compared the signature on the ballot request and the one on file for Wiggins’ late wife. When the signatures didn’t match, sheriff’s deputies were sent to interview Wiggins who quickly admitted wrongdoing.
While the story shows that voter fraud does happen, and people are willing to go ahead with it, it’s also good news for Florida – a crucial state in the November election.
Bennett told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune that voter rolls in the state are being updated all the time and that voter fraud is rare. He has been in charge of Manatee County’s electoral offices since 2012.
“The amount of fraud committed in Florida in elections is very small,” he said. “People complain that vote by mail is crooked; it’s not, we catch them, we verify it and any supervisor of elections in the state of Florida I know is just as conscious about it as I am.”
It’s good news for Florida, but this isn’t necessarily the case across the rest of the country. It also doesn’t take into account the fact that many ballots simply get lost in the mail, or even get dumped by mailmen.
An investigation in Pennsylvania recently concluded that sone nine votes for President Donald Trump were disposed of by a worker. A bipartisan commission headed by former President Jimmy Carter also found in 2005 that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”
