New arrest videos captured confusion among suspects accused of voter fraud in Florida, after Governor Ron DeSantis announced earlier this year that he was planning to further investigate alleged election crimes.
On Tuesday, the Tampa Bay Times obtained arrest footage from August showing law enforcement officers from the Tampa Bay Police Department and the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office notifying the suspects that they were being arrested for alleged voter fraud.
"What is going on?" one person, identified as Tony Patterson, asked officers while being placed in handcuffs.
The new videos comes several months after DeSantis announced that he was creating the Office of Election Crimes and Security to investigate possible election crimes. A spokesperson for DeSantis' office told Newsweek in April that the new legislation would include staff members that are trained and have a "clearly defined responsibility to investigate alleged election-related crimes" and "will function as a powerful deterrent to would-be perpetrators of election fraud."
Before DeSantis signed the legislation, the Campaign Legal Center said: "This approach to election security is a solution in search of a problem."
"The criminalization of the election process could be weaponized to target election officials who make honest mistakes and intimidate or harass minority voters and other vulnerable communities to discourage them from going to the polls," the Campaign Legal Center said.
In August, DeSantis announced that following creation of the new election crimes office, law enforcement officials had arrested at least 20 people for allegedly voting illegally. According to the Tampa Bay Times, the people arrested had felony convictions but voted in the 2020 election.
"That is against the law and now they're going to pay the price for it, so they will be charged," DeSantis said at the time. "They are being charged and arrested today with election fraud."
According to the Tampa Bay Times, Patterson was previously convicted of a felony sex offense, but the arrest video, he told police officers that his crimes "happened years ago." The arrest video also showed Patterson saying that he was encouraged to vote by his brother.
"I always listen to everybody else. Vote for this....come on, man," he said in the video. "I thought felons were able to vote. That's why I signed a petition form, that's what I remember....Why would you let me vote if I wasn't able to vote?"
While speaking with Newsweek on Tuesday, Blair Bowie, of the Campaign Legal Center, said that "illegal voting requires, in the definition of the crime, that the people knew that they were not eligible to vote."
"And there is absolutely no evidence that these people knew that they were ineligible. We know that the law has been confusing and has changed and that there's been a lot of misinformation. And to indict and arrest people, you have to have probable cause that they actually committed a crime. There's no probable cause," said Bowie, who created the Campaign Legal Center's Restore Your Vote project. "These videos further show that they had no idea they were ineligible.
"This is intended to undermine public trust in our elections by supporting this myth that there's widespread voter fraud."
Newsweek reached out to DeSantis' office for comment.
Correction 10/18/22, 3:15 p.m. ET: This story has been corrected to fix a quote from Blair Bowie.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Matthew Impelli is a Newsweek staff writer based in New York. His focus is reporting social issues and crime. In ... Read more
