Florida authorities nabbed a registered Democrat after he attempted to “test the system” by requesting an absentee ballot for his late wife, officials said.
Manatee County Sheriff’s Office began investigating Larry Wiggins, 62, after the mail-in ballot was requested for his wife who had been dead for two years, the Bradenton Herald reported.
“As soon as they pulled up the file it showed that she is dead,” Manatee County Supervisor of Elections Mike Bennett said.
Bennett said his office then compared the handwriting on the ballot request with previous documentation and found it wasn’t a match.
Deputies then interviewed Wiggins, who is a registered Democrat, and he confessed that he was trying to “test the system,” the newspaper reported.
“He wanted to test the system,” Bennett said. “He did test the system, and guess what? It worked.”
Wiggins was arrested Thursday on a charge of third-degree felony voter fraud, the outlet reported. He has since been released on $1,500 bail.
Bennett said the case is an example of why voters should feel confident in the elections process.
“People complain that vote by mail is crooked; it’s not, we catch them, we verify it and any supervisor of elections in the state of Florida I know is just as conscious about it as I am,” he said.
Fears of voter fraud have been heightened nationwide, with President Trump arguing that an increase in mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic could lead to widespread problems.
But Bennett, a Republican, said this was the first instance of voter fraud he had come across in the county since assuming his post in 2012.
“The amount of fraud committed in Florida in elections is very small,” he said, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
“The amount of fraud is very, very small . . . People who think there’s a lot of fraud are seriously mistaken.”