Republicans are known for projecting their their own flaws and criminal behavior on to others and “vote fraud” is no exception:
At first, Nelia Estevez didn’t believe that her voter registration could have been changed without her knowledge to reflect a new political party. Voting was sacrosanct to the 69-year-old Cuban immigrant, and she was certain of her party affiliation, she told a Miami Herald reporter who visited.
“I’ve been a Democrat since the day I became a citizen,” Estevez said as she rifled through old mail from the elections department, each letter carefully labeled by year and stowed in a plastic tub. She pulled out card after card showing the same thing — Democrat — until she found the most recent letter, and there it was: “Republican Party of Florida.” “They changed me!” she cried. “Who would do this?”
Records kept by the Miami-Dade elections department provided an answer: canvassers from the Republican Party of Florida. They submitted the form that changed Estevez from Democrat to Republican on Dec. 22, 2021. Later, Republican canvassers submitted a second form, again marking her down as a Republican, records show.
Estevez doesn’t even remember speaking with any of them. In all, 22 voters at Vernon Ashley Plaza, the public housing complex in Hialeah where Estevez lives, told reporters their party affiliation had also been changed without their knowledge or consent last year. All of them became Republicans. All of the paperwork was submitted by Republican Party canvassers, records show.
The pattern was repeated in low-income housing complexes throughout Hialeah and Little Havana, a Herald investigation found. A team of reporters visited eight locations where voter registration data showed unusually high numbers of voters switching from one party to another last year. The reporters knocked on every door where someone’s party affiliation had changed.
Four out of every five voters who spoke to the Herald — 141 in total — said that their party affiliation had been changed without their knowledge. In all but six cases, records show they were registered as Republicans by canvassers from the Republican Party of Florida. (Four of the others had recently moved and their registrations were sent through the DMV. And the remaining two were registered as Republicans, but by Democratic Party canvassers, records show.)
A judge on Tuesday sentenced a Las Vegas man to probation on a charge he voted twice in the 2020 election by mailing in his deceased wife’s ballot.
The I-Team was first to report that Donald “Kirk” Hartle, 55, was facing two charges relating to last year’s election. In court Tuesday, Hartle pleaded guilty to one charge of voting more than once in the same election. […]
Rosemarie Hartle’s ballot was one of two cited by Nevada Republicans and national party leaders as evidence of voter fraud in Nevada.
“‘Disbelief’ and ‘sickening’… that’s how Kirk Hartle feels about someone voting in his deceased wife’s name,” a tweet from the Nevada GOP, posted Nov. 10, 2020, said. “How did the forged signature pass Clark County’s signature verification machine? And this isn’t the only case of a deceased person voting in NV.”
Meanwhile, the authorities have been harassing this poor woman and lying about it:
A Memphis judge has ordered a new trial for Pamela Moses, a woman who was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to register to vote. The case attracted national attention following a Guardian report, because of the severity of the sentence. Moses said she had no idea she was ineligible.
Moses has been in prison since December, when her bond was revoked. On Thursday, the Guardian revealed new evidence in the case that was not produced at trial. Moses was released from custody on Friday, according to Claiborne Ferguson, her attorney.
Moses was convicted last year for submitting a document in 2019 indicating she was eligible to vote. Prosecutors said she knew that this was false, because just months before a judge issued an order telling Moses she was still on probation for a 2015 felony. In Tennessee, people on felony probation cannot vote.
When she turned in the form, Moses believed that the probation for her 2015 felony had expired, and a probation officer signed a certificate indicating that this was the case and that she was eligible. Prosecutors said Moses deceived the officer into signing the certificate.
But evidence obtained by the Guardian this week showed that corrections officials investigated the error immediately and determined that the probation officer – identified as Manager Billington – was negligent and made an error while Moses waited in the lobby of his office. “Manager Billington advised that he thought he did due diligence in making his decision,” Joe Williams, an administrator in the department of corrections, wrote in an email to Lisa Helton, a top department official. “Manager Billington failed to adequately investigate the status of this case. He failed to review all of the official documents available through the Shelby county justice portal.”
Ferguson, Moses’ attorney, said he had never seen the document before the Guardian showed it to him on Wednesday.
W Mark Ward, the judge who oversaw the case and sentenced Moses, cited the prosecution’s failure to disclose the letter, even if it was inadvertent, as one of the reasons he was ordering a new trial. “The document does contain information that was not addressed in the direct and cross-examinations of Billington and contained the identity of an additional possible witness for the defense,” he said.
The ruling was an abrupt reversal for Ward, who yelled at Moses’ lawyer during the sentencing hearing and said she tricked the probation officer.
“This ruling is an extraordinary development. It is very rare for a judge to reverse himself like this, and it’s telling that he sentenced her so severely and summarily discounted her position before the case made national news,” said Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, a criminal justice nonprofit.
The district attorney’s office, Spickler said, “has long had a reputation for failing to disclose material evidence that could benefit the accused. This is yet another shocking example of that.”
This woman has been in jail over this since December.
It’s to easy to just say that anything Republicans accuse others of doing is a clear indication of what they are doing themselves. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful clue.