Wednesday, December 15, 2021

Voter fraud alert

I wouldn't be paying any attention to this except that a good friend with whom I worked for months to elect Joe Biden found herself stuck in The Villages this year. She was attending to the affairs of a diseased relative.

She reports that you can't go anywhere in the famously conservative Florida retirement community without having to listen to "outside music" -- oldies interspersed with rightwing news. (The only place I've run across this was the hotel complex adjacent to Disneyland's Magic Kingdom in Anaheim. The apparent sprinkler heads spoke.)

Guess what? The Villages has proved to be a hotbed of (alleged) voter fraud -- Republican voter fraud.

SUMTER COUNTY, Fla. – Three residents of The Villages have recently been arrested as part of an ongoing investigation into voter fraud, court records show. 
Jay Ketcik, Joan Halstead and John Rider are each charged with casting more than one ballot in an election, a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison. . . . 
Ketcik, 63, is accused of voting by mail in Florida in October 2020 while also casting an absentee ballot in his original home state of Michigan, court records show. 
Halstead, 71, voted in-person in Florida but also cast an absentee ballot in New York, prosecutors allege. . . . 
Rider, 61, was arrested by Brevard County deputies at the Royal Caribbean cruise ship terminal at Port Canaveral on Dec. 3, according to court records. Details of the accusations against him were not immediately available, but prosecutors indicated he also cast ballots both out-of-state and in Florida. . . . 
All three are registered as Republicans in Florida, voter registration records show.
 
The place even looks a little like Anaheim, doesn't it?

• • •
H/t JVL at The Bulwark.

No comments: