Prosecutors recently announced that they’d be dropping charges against Marsha Ervin, a 69-year-old Black woman who was arrested in Florida on charges of voter fraud.
On Sep. 29, Ervin was arrested by Tallahassee police in her home in the early morning at around 3 a.m. following claims by The Florida Office of Election Crimes and Security.
Ervin was accused of voter fraud because she was on probation for a felony conviction in 2016 when she voted in the 2020 general and 2022 primary elections.
As reported by CNN, State Attorney Jack Campbell recently announced in a filing on Tuesday that there wasn’t efficient evidence or witnesses to attest that Ervin was told that she was unable to vote before voting. Meanwhile, according to Campbell, there was some evidence to prove that she believed she could legally vote.
The decision was made after Ervin’s probation officer used two documents on the terms of her probation as evidence for the case. Per the documents, while one was signed in October 2022 and explicitly said that Ervin could not vote on probation, the one signed in November 2018 did not include the same or similar terms.
According to Campbell, the dates she voted on were in between the two documents being written up and there’s no evidence to prove that Ervin continued to vote after being told that she could not.
“There was a change of circumstances,” Campbell said, according to WCTV. “I don’t want people to be scared to vote. People need to be able to vote.”
The announcement that the charges against Ervin will be dropped comes a little over a week after civil rights attorney Ben Crump joined her legal team.
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In a news conference on Oct. 10, Crump highlighted how Ervin’s case is one of voter intimidation.
Any type of voting intimidation is barred under Section 11 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which outlaws any type of action. Although voter intimidation was made illegal under acts such as Section 131(b) in the 1957 legislation, the passage of it under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was expanded and was expected to be easily made more enforceable.
Although laws have been passed to prevent it, voter intimidation, a form of voter suppression, has still yet to cease to exist.
Following the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1981, the Republican National Committee created a National Ballot Security Task Force to discourage Democratic voters.
Police officers off their shift were tasked to patrol and were armed at voting polls located in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods as a form of voter intimidation. As a result, Democrat James J. Florio lost the race to Republican Thomas H. Kean by nearly 1,800 votes.
To this day, voting intimidation is a present fear among voters.
In a Reuters poll released in late 2022, approximately two in five, or 43% of U.S. voters, said that they were worried about a form of voter intimidation in the midterm elections.
Referring to previous cases of self-appointed people patrolling the polls, the fear was more present for Democrats as 51% of Democrats said that they were worried about increased violence.
