Voter fraud investigation in Lake, Sumter counties shows sex offenders cast 2020 ballots

The Fifth Circuit State Attorney's Office is investigating voter fraud in Lake and Sumter County during the 2020 general election.

This investigation comes after Gainesville-based database researcher Mark Glaeser cross-checked Florida voter lists against the FDLE's public Florida Sexual Offenders database. Through his research, he found that six registered sex offenders in Lake County and three in Sumter County cast ballots.

Their votes would not have changed the outcome in any race and, so far, no charges have been filed.

This week, Assistant State Attorney Jonathan Olson confirmed the office is investigating cases of alleged voter fraud, but declined to comment further.

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Researching voter fraud

Glaeser first looked into Alachua County, then expanded his search across the state of Florida, including in Lake and Sumter.

He said that locating the names of these ineligible voters is not a difficult process and something that the state should already be doing.

“This is what I call low hanging fruit. Easily detected, undetected by the state or the supervisors," Glaeser said. “They’ve really dropped the ball.”

What has added bit of confusion into the mix is the passage of Amendment 4: Voting Rights Restoration for Felons Initiative in 2018.

Amendment 4 "was designed to automatically restore the right to vote for people with prior felony convictions, except those convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense, upon completion of their sentences."

The passage of this amendment allowed felons who were not serving a felony judgement who have paid all their fines, fees, or restitution to be eligible to vote in Florida.

However, people convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense cannot have their rights restored, making it illegal for them to participate in an election.

So far Glaeser has researched 11 counties and filed complaints on 75 sex offenders. The highest percentage he's seen so far has been in Gadsden County. Of the 23,000 people who cast ballots in 2020, 23 of them were sex offenders.

"So they had 0.1% of their total voting populous was illegal votes from sex offenders and sexual predators," he said.

And there aren't any overarching demographic trends in terms of race or political affiliation, Glaeser said.

He recognizes that there's "not widespread, wholesale voter fraud."

"But to say that it’s so statistically insignificant, I would point them to Al Gore and George Bush which was decided in Florida by eight votes per county," he said.

In the supervisor's office

Glaeser took his records to Alan Hays, the Lake County Supervisor of Elections, who purged the sex offenders from the voter rolls.

The process to remove a felon from the voter rolls typically works like this:

The Lake County Clerk of the Court sends information on the felon to the State Division of Elections. The office would then let the Lake County Supervisor of Elections know the voter is ineligible, and they would then notify that particular individual. When notified, they give the individual an outline of what they need to do to either verify the conviction or to dispute the conviction.

"There was obviously a failure of the system somewhere," Hays said. "Did the Clerk of the Court in some county fail to notify the state? Or did the state fail to notify us?"

The issue has been out of Hays' hands since he referred the cases to the State Attorney's Office in January.

This article originally appeared on Daily Commercial: Voter fraud investigation underway in Lake, Sumter counties