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WASHINGTON >> After 15 years of scrapes with police, the last thing that 33-year-old Therris L. Conney needed was another run-in with the law. He got one anyway two years ago, after election officials held a presentation on voting rights for inmates of the county jail in Gainesville, Fla.

Apparently satisfied that he could vote, Conney registered after the session and cast a ballot in 2020. In May, he was arrested for breaking a state law banning voting by people serving felony sentences — and he was sentenced to almost another full year in jail.

That show-no-mercy approach to voter fraud is what Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has encouraged this year during his reelection campaign.

“That was against the law,” he said last month about charges against 20 other felons who voted in Florida, “and they’re going to pay a price for it.”

But many of those cases seem to already be falling apart because, like Conney, the former felons did not intend to vote illegally. And the more typical kind of voter fraud case in Florida has long exacted punishment at a steep discount.

Last winter, four residents of Republican-leaning retirement community The Villages were arrested for voting twice — once in Florida and again in other states where they had also lived.

Despite being charged with third-degree felonies, the same as Conney, two of the Villages residents who pleaded guilty escaped having a criminal record entirely by taking a 24-hour civics class. Trials are pending for the other two.

Florida is an exaggerated version of the U.S. as a whole. A review by The New York Times of about 400 voting fraud charges filed nationwide since 2017 underscores what critics of fraud crackdowns have long said: Actual prosecutions are blue-moon events and often netted people who didn’t realize they were breaking the law.

Punishment can be wildly inconsistent: Most violations draw wrist slaps, while a few high-profile prosecutions produce draconian sentences. Penalties often fall heaviest on those least able to mount a defense. Those who are poor and Black are more likely to be sent to jail than comfortable retirees facing similar charges.

The high-decibel political rhetoric behind fraud prosecutions drowns out how infrequent — and sometimes how unfair — those prosecutions are, said Richard L. Hasen, an expert on election law and democracy issues at the UCLA School of Law.

“It’s hard to see felons in Gainesville getting jail terms and then look at people in The Villages getting no time at all and see this as a rational system,” he said.

The Times searched newspapers in all 50 states, internet accounts of fraud and online databases of cases, including one maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation, to compile a list of prosecutions in the past five years. But there is no comprehensive list of voter fraud cases, and the Times’ list is undoubtedly incomplete.

The number of individuals charged — roughly 1-1/2 per state per year — is infinitesimal in a country where more than 159.7 million votes were cast in the 2020 general election alone.

For all the fevered rhetoric about crackdowns on illegal voting, what’s most striking about voter fraud prosecutions is how modest the penalties for convictions tend to be.

Most fraud cases fall into one of four categories: falsely filling out absentee ballots, usually to vote in the name of a relative; voting twice, usually in two states; votes cast illegally by felons; or votes cast by noncitizens.

Edward Snodgrass, a trustee in Porter Township, Ohio, said he was trying to “execute a dying man’s wishes” when he filled out and mailed in his deceased father’s ballot in the 2020 election. He was fined $800 and sentenced to three days in jail.

Charles Eugene Cartier, 81, of Madison, N.H., and Attleboro, Mass., pleaded guilty in New Hampshire to voting in more than one state, a Class B felony, in the 2016 election. He was fined $1,000 plus a penalty assessment of $240 and had his 60-day prison sentence suspended on condition of good behavior.

At least four Oregonians cast votes in two states in 2016; none were fined more than $1,000, and felony charges were reduced to violations, akin to traffic tickets.

Two federal prosecutors in North Carolina, Matthew G.T. Martin and Robert J. Higdon, made national headlines in 2018 with a campaign to prosecute noncitizens who voted illegally. In the end, around 30 charges were brought, out of some 4.7 million votes cast in 2016. But prison sentences in those cases were few and usually measured in months; fines, usually, were in the hundreds of dollars or less.

Still, there are exceptions, often apparently meant to send a message in states where politicians have tried to elevate fraud to a major issue.

Foremost is Texas, where convictions that would merit probation or fines elsewhere have drawn crushing prison sentences. Rosa Maria Ortega, a green card holder who cast illegal votes in 2012 and 2014, was sentenced to eight years in prison for a crime she said she unknowingly committed. Crystal Mason, who cast a ballot in 2016 while on federal probation for a tax felony, drew five years for violating felon voting laws. The court has been ordered to reconsider her case.

Both prosecutions were the work of the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, perhaps the nation’s most zealous enforcer of voter fraud laws. Paxton runs a $2.2 million-a-year election integrity squad that claims a 15-year record of prosecutions, although some of its high-profile cases, like a lengthy one against a South Texas mayor, ended in acquittals.

Many of the squad’s cases have turned out to be decidedly small-bore affairs. Paxton’s integrity sleuths recorded 16 prosecutions in 2020, all of them Houston-area residents who put wrong addresses on registration applications, The Houston Chronicle has reported. None resulted in jail time.

A handful of states have followed Texas’ lead. In Tennessee, Pamela Moses, a racial justice activist who violated a ban on voting by felons — mistakenly, she said — drew a six-year prison sentence in 2021. Prosecutors abandoned the charge after she won a new trial.

In Florida, Kelvin Bolton, 56 and homeless, attended the same presentation that Conney did and also voted in 2020. He has been awaiting trial in the Gainesville jail for five months, unable to make the $30,000 bond slapped on him by a county judge.

“I said, ‘Kelvin, why did you vote?’” his sister, Derbra Bolton Owete, said in an interview. “And he said, ‘Well, they told me I could vote, so I voted.’ “

An amendment to the Florida Constitution that voters approved in 2018 restored voting rights to Bolton and other former felons who had completed their sentences. But the Republican Legislature passed a law requiring full payment of fines and court fees to complete a sentence. The state has no central record of what former felons owe, adding another hurdle to their efforts to regain voting rights.

Because Bolton owes fines or court costs, he faces felony charges of perjury and casting illegal votes.

People of means usually fare better.

In Kansas, a Republican member of the House of Representatives, Steve Watkins, railed during his 2020 reelection campaign against a “corrupt” prosecutor after Watkins was charged with illegally misstating his residence for voting and with lying to law enforcement officers, both felonies. Watkins later quietly accepted a diversion plea, escaping a criminal record in return for paying court costs and hewing to requirements like staying out of legal trouble. (Watkins lost his reelection bid.)

In North Carolina, prosecutors have yet to decide after six months of scrutiny the seemingly straightforward question of whether Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff to President Donald Trump and a former North Carolina congressman, essentially did the same thing.

A few prosecutions have approached the sort of broader allegations of fraud that are common in political messaging, though all were local affairs.

A convoluted tale of election shenanigans in the Canton, Mississippi, city government produced charges against at least nine people in 2019, although punishment was minimal, and one woman was cleared.

An absentee-ballot scheme that forced a rerun of the 2018 9th Congressional District race in North Carolina led to seven fraud indictments. The alleged ringleader, Leslie McCrae Dowless, a Republican operative, died before he could stand trial. In Florida, where attacks on voter fraud have been a staple of DeSantis’ term as governor, prosecutors have adjudicated at least 25 voting law cases since 2017. Until recently, penalties have been mild: probation, small fines, jail time served concurrently with other sentences.

The 20 cases of voting by felons announced last month nearly double that total. But those prosecutions appear endangered because the state itself approved the felons’ applications to vote and even issued them registration cards. The Republican who sponsored the state law requiring felons to pay court costs, state Sen. Jeff Brandes, told The Miami Herald that he believed that those who were charged had no intent to break the law.

Asked about that, a spokesperson for DeSantis noted that the governor said that local election officials vet registration applications, not the state. That contradicts what his own former secretary of state, Laurel Lee, told journalists in 2020, The Herald reported.

“When people sign up” to vote, “they check a box saying they’re eligible,” DeSantis said at a news conference last week. “If they’re not eligible and they’re lying, then they can be held accountable.”

Critics of DeSantis say his goal is less to stop fraud than to make political hay from Republican voters’ obsession with the subject, something the party has relentlessly stoked for years.

“This is political grandstanding,” said Daniel Smith, an expert on elections and voting at the University of Florida. “Individuals are registering, being told they can vote, handed registration cards and then told they’ve committed a felony. It’s tragic.”

Sometimes the focus on voter fraud can become self-fulfilling.

An Iowa woman, Terri Lynn Rote, said she cast two ballots for Trump in 2016 because she believed her first vote would be switched to favor Hillary Clinton.

“I wasn’t planning on doing it twice; it was spur of the moment,” she later told The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier. “The polls are rigged.”

A judge fined her $750 and sentenced her to two years’ probation.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2022 The New York Times Company