A 69-year-old Tallahassee resident has been charged with felony voter fraud following Gov. Ron DeSantis’ launch of the Office of Election Crime and Security, an agency created under DeSantis’ administration intended to investigate election law violations.
The elderly woman, Marsha Ervin, was asleep in her home when police knocked at her door at 3 a.m. on Sept. 29. To Ervin’s surprise, officers told her they had a warrant for her arrest. Immediately following, she was placed in handcuffs and taken into custody.
Police records confirmed, “[the officer] arrived and made contact with Ervin at the front door of her residence and placed [her] under arrest for her warrants.”
“She was placed into double locked handcuffs, searched incident to arrest, and placed into the rear of [the] marked patrol vehicle,” the officer wrote in his report.
The warrant was issued a year after they notified her that an investigation was underway for her alleged voter fraud in the 2020 general election. Records show that an investigator for the Federal Department of Law Enforcement provided Ervin with a notice — which was given to them by the Office of Election Crime and Security — to conduct a criminal investigation on Ervin for the allegation.
Ervin, who is less than a month away from completing her probation following a felony conviction that occurred in 2016, registered to vote in 2020. She was given a government-issued voter registration card and cast a ballot in the 2020 general election a month later.
Two years later, she voted by mail in the 2022 primary election. Thus, she did not receive confirmation that she was ineligible to vote until months following the submission of her mail-in ballot.
Ervin told investigators, “[she] was told she could [vote] when she was released from prison.” She further said, she watched TV news stories that, “indicated felons could vote.”
Therefore, confused by the allegations, Ervin said, “she would not have voted if she believed it was against the law because she just got out of prison and had begun probation.”
Her legal team, attorney Mutaqee Akbar alongside attorney Ben Crump, held a press conference Tuesday in the Leon County Courthouse “demand[ing] charges be dropped and demand[ing] clarity in Florida voter eligibility laws,” Crump’s office said in a statement.
“For this to happen to her, well, it really tells you, it could happen to any of us,” Crump said. “Because this is about voter intimidation.”
The state attorney’s office has not responded to the demand to drop Ervin’s charges. She is out on bond for one count of submission of false voter registration information and two counts of voting as an unqualified elector, which are third-degree felony charges.