Jennifer Scott is a 52-year-old resident of 29 Reybury Lane. She is a convicted felon, according to the State Attorney’s Office, and therefore not eligible to vote under Florida law unless she has successfully gone through the clemency process to have her rights restored. She has not, according to the State Attorney’s Office.
In 2016, she allegedly committed two more felonies. First, she falsely swore to being eligible to vote on her voter-registration card. Then she cast a ballot in the 2016 election, again breaking the law.
Her ballot was counted and is now part of the historical tabulations that were certified for that election, though her vote would not have changed any of the races, none of which had margins of less than at least scores or hundreds of votes.
On Tuesday, Scott was arrested and incarcerated at the Flagler County jail on the two third-degree felony charges. She remains there today on $3,000 bond.
Her arrest may feed into a broader–and false–narrative that voter fraud is a problem. In fact, the arrest underscores the extreme rarity of such problems, and the fact that in the near-totality of cases, the few people who do seek to register or vote when they’re not legally eligible to do so are caught and weeded off the voting rolls beforehand, as the system is intended to work: there have been a total of three arrests in the past two years in Flagler County, where 78,000 people are registered to vote.
And what fault there is in the system is not that of the local Supervisor of Elections’ office, but that of the Florida Department of State, whose notices alert local elections supervisor when a new registrant is found to be ineligible, Flagler Supervisor Kaiti Lenhart said today.
“Those notifications initially come from the department of state,” Lenhart said. Then the local elections office sends a notice to the illegally registered voter, giving him or her an opportunity to show documentation to the contrary, such as clemency papers. When that’s not forthcoming, the rolls are cleared of that name, and the local State Attorney’s Office is informed of the possible infraction. The State Attorney then files charges when it deems the accusation justified.
The problem, Lenhart said, is that during the 2016 election cycles, there’s been delays in notices from the State Department. “Here in this past election cycle it was several months,” Lenhart said.
Critics of the system are sometimes misinformed about the steps that lead to the discovery of a fraud, or who is at first responsible for detecting it.
The first responsibility, of course, is that of the voter, who affirms eligibility on a voting registration card. Elections officials don’t verify that affirmation right then and there. They are required by law to accept it and process the registration. They are also required to send new registrations to the State Department, where the information is verified against state databases.
When a voter is flagged as ineligible, “part of the process is we check to make sure that they didn’t vote,” Lenhart said. “If they did, we send notice to the state attorney,” including documentation that they voted.
While Lenhart acknowledges that a voter cast what may have been a fraudulent vote–Scott has not been convicted–
“we would have needed hundreds to swing an election,” Lenhart said. “Not even close in our county, however in a smaller election, on a smaller scale, that’s why voter eligibility is so important. Every vote counts.” Still, she added, the incident is “pretty isolated. The message it sends is that any type of voter fraud will be investigated and reported to the state attorney.”
President Trump launched a voter fraud commission earlier this year after himself making several false statements, among them that millions of ballots were fraudulently cast in favor of Hillary Clinton, costing him the popular vote. The commission has been mired in a mixture of controversy and inaction.
Scott’s record includes arrests in St. Johns and Marion County, where she’s faced auto-theft charges. She’s also been arrested on a grand-theft charge in Flagler in 2016, a felony charge downgraded to a first degree misdemeanor on which she was found guilty.
Ed says
The title should’ve read ” A rarely prosecuted vase of voter fraud.
Sherry says
OMG. . . this photo must be FAKE NEWS! I see a “white” person who convicted “voter fraud”. Are my eyes deceiving me? Say it ain’t so! Wonder who she voted for? I think I can guess. LOL! LOL! LOL!
Chris A Pickett says
One of our “finer” Palm Coast residents. Let me guess whom she voted for…….
Steadfastandloyal says
Funny how these moron commentors ignore the fact they would be the first to cry in their hankies if valid id’s were required to cast a ballot. Lol lol lol…
ConstantlyAmazed says
Your wrong, voter fraud is a big problem in this country. Florida and a few other states verify voter eligibility but a lot others do not. It is no secret that there is a large number of people regeristered to vote in historically Democratic states that have been dead for years. Death records are not crossed referenced with voter roles. In fact voter registrations in these states are not verified at all. Just fill out the card and send it in. This is an issues that has been known for years. In fact there was an old joke about the 1960 presidentially election that Johnson had the cattle vote for Kennedy.
Votes are to important as we know and voting rights should be highly protected. This country needs now more than ever to have PHOTO VOTER IDENTIFICATION cards that can be checked for eligibility.
Sw says
Shes been busy
just saying says
Interesting comments in that Dems hope and assume she voted for Trump and the reverse for Trump voters. Thoughtful consideration has been replaced by the quest to prove our beliefs are true.
Just sayin' says
Are we really paying money to prosecute this petty crap. I think we have bigger things to worry about!
Anonymous says
What is the states excuse for not getting information to the SOE on time? The state is to blame, they approved the voter registration application. How many more ineligible voters voted that we don’t know about? Trump was right again, voter fraud exists.
George says
“Mass voter fraud” is fake news from your fake president. A few slip through the cracks here and there as the article accurately states.
Outsider says
If mass voter fraud is fake news, then let the commission proceed uninhibited. Then you can wave the results in the faces of those claiming widespread fraud. Of course, if there is one thing liberals fear most, it’s the truth.
New York 13 says
Fake president I didn’t realize Hillary won. Let us blame everything on Trump.
Anonymous says
Had the state done their job and done it when it should have been done this voter never would have had the opportunity to vote! The voter would have been removed from the voter rolls before the election. The state had to approve the voters registration application before she was added to the rolls so I would agree that it is the state’s fault. So much for the checks and balances that the media and the state wants us to believe are in place.
Anonymous says
She payed her debt to society and still she’s a nobody! If she had money like the Trumps with people in their pockets the crime woulda never happened and she’d woulda been able to vote. Gee America is great!
Florida voter says
@Outsider
Any information the Commission obtains becomes public record, fully accessible to anyone. That’s ANYONE, not just any member of the commission, not just any member of congress or even just any American. That’s ANYONE. Globally. In Florida, our party affiliation, voting record (to some extent), name, address, date of birth are already public record, but not our social security number. Many states protect more data than Florida. The Commission was wanting to negate any state privacy laws/regulations regarding voter information. If a state wants the phone number of its citizens to not be tied to voter registration, I don’t see that the Federal Gov. should be able to violate that.
@ConstantlyAmazed
You sound like the same party affiliation that felt President Obama committed vast governmental overreach, but you’re asking the government to do exactly that now. The argument against requiring a government issued photo ID is that it is equivalent to the poll taxes that were declared unconstitutional by the 24th amendment.
Sherry says
Now for some actual facts regarding the trump Federal Commission that is costing us “millions”. This from the Atlantic:
The LDF lawsuit finds in the new commission a veritable rogues gallery of voter suppression. The first defendant named is Trump himself, who has touted controversial—and false—claims of millions of fraudulent votes in the 2016 election. But much of the plaintiffs’ ire is directed towards vice chair Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State and the de facto leader of the commission. In his position in Kansas, Kobach has launched a one-of-a-kind effort to track down illegal noncitizen voters, an aggressive campaign that has challenged hundreds of votes and brought to court dozens of campaigns but has only secured one such conviction so far.
In addition to Kobach, the lawsuit identifies other members of the commission as part of a conservative voter-suppression brain trust. There’s J. Christian Adams, a former DOJ official who’s been a prolific proponent of wild theories about voter fraud. There’s Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio Secretary of State involved with multiple voter fraud organizations who himself has claimed that “more than a million noncitizens may have voted in November.” And then there’s Hans von Spakovsky, a former U.S. Election Assistance Commission official who has long chased the specter of voter fraud and has railed against the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, or “moter-voter,” a law designed to expand voter registration efforts in driver’s licenses offices.
The other six lawsuits facing that interconnected network of voter-fraud largely echo the claims of the LDF, including its objection to a recent request from Kobach to each state for extensive amounts of public and private voter data. The Electronic Privacy Information Center’s July 3 lawsuit alleges that, if fulfilled, the request and the commission’s shoddy data practices would amount to a massive breach of privacy. The American Civil Liberties Union lodged a complaint that commission chair Mike Pence and Kobach broke federal transparency laws in the commission’s early actions. Four other lawsuits largely echo these claims.
Against that tide of opposition, Kobach has done little to counter claims that his project is little more than a naked suppression operation against people of color.
Sherry says
@constantlyamazed. . . please attach the link to credentialed FACTS to prove your claim that there is massive voter fraud in the USA.
For those that wish to be educated, take a good read:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/magazine/the-man-behind-trumps-voter-fraud-obsession.html