Two Jacksonville men have been charged with registering dead people to vote. Devin Deangelo King and Jordan Rayeshaun Daniels have both been arrested. The motive does not appear to be political, but personal financial gain.
“This was a group working with what we call a third-party organization,” said Duval County Supervisor of Elections Mike Hogan. “… We did not see anything political about it. It was, I think, people who were greedy. There’s an incentive there to get as many as you can in.”
Hogan maintained that the discovery of more than 60 dead voter registrations does not indicate lapses in the Duval County elections integrity process, overall.
“It just shows the diligence of the people who are working through this process to make sure that everything is right, not just the accuracy of the vote count, but the validity of our voter roll,” Hogan said. “You have to be diligent to make sure you keep accurate records, and this is proof that we can find and eliminate it.”
According to the state attorney’s office, investigators were set to meet with the Duval County Supervisor of Elections back in August with the intention of reviewing voter inconsistencies. Flagged voter registration applications were turned over to the investigators.
“As we go down the list, the first thing we will be checking is the driver’s license number and the driver’s license number and the names match but when we looked at the signature, it didn’t match the signature on our file,” Hogan said to Action News Jax. “Then we noticed there was a pattern and we found multiple of those.”
The business model for being paid for registering voters is done on a per-application basis. The two men charged and arrested were intending to register as many people as possible in order to get paid per application.
“The security of voter registration and elections is a serious matter and of paramount importance today,” said Hogan. “It is vital that the voters of Duval County, the State of Florida, and the nation as a whole trust the registration and election process, from start to finish. The discovery of these attempts at fraud shows that the system here in Duval County and all of Florida is secure and trustworthy. Voters can have confidence that their information is secure and will be counted accurately.”
This comes on the heels of Florida’s Legislature passing new election integrity laws, upheld in court, based on 2012 grand jury recommendations related to a voter fraud case in Miami-Dade at the time.
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Grant Holcomb is a reporter at the Florida Capital Star and the Star News Network. Follow Grant on Twitter and direct message tips.
Photo “Vote Here Signs” by Phil Roeder CC BY 2.0.
