It all makes for good cinema.
At issue in the case were two Arizona laws: one banned the collection of absentee ballots by anyone other than a relative or caregiver, and the other threw out any ballots cast in the wrong precinct.
Subtitle:
Hervis Rogers was ineligible to cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential primary because he was still on parole, according to the state’s attorney general. He now faces four decades in prison.
———-
A 62-year-old Texas man who waited hours to cast a ballot in last year’s presidential primary was arrested this week on charges that he had voted illegally.
The man, Hervis Earl Rogers of Houston, waited seven hours outside Texas Southern University to vote in the state’s presidential primary in March 2020. On Wednesday, he was arrested and charged with two counts of illegal voting, a felony. According to court documents, the charges stem from ballots that Mr. Rogers cast on March 3, 2020, and on Nov. 6, 2018, while he was still on parole and not legally permitted to vote.
Tommy Buser-Clancy, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and one of the lawyers representing Mr. Rogers, said that Mr. Rogers thought that he could vote during the primary.
“Mr. Rogers’s prosecution really shows the danger of overcriminalizing the election code and the process of participating in a democratic society,” he said. “In particular, it raises the danger that criminal statutes in the election code are being used to go after individuals who at worst have made an innocent mistake. That’s not what any laws should be doing.”…
LOOK, ILLEGAL voting in Texas!
Texas Man Who Waited Hours to Vote Is Arrested on Charges of Illegal Voting
In 1995, Rogers was arrested and sentenced to 25 years in prison for burglary and intent to commit theft. He was out on parole May 20, 2004, and his parole was set to end June 13, 2020.
Mr. Rogers’s story ricocheted around social media after he was identified as the very last person in line to vote at his polling place. Houston Public Media reported at the time that Mr. Rogers arrived at the polls just before 7 p.m. and waited roughly six hours to vote, long after the polls had closed and many others had left the line.
“It is insane, but it’s worth it,” Mr. Rogers told Houston Public Media while waiting in line.
Mr. Rogers was being held at the Montgomery County Jail with bail set at $100,000. He could face upward of 40 years in prison — 20 years for each charge, according to Mr. Buser-Clancy, who added that Mr. Rogers’s past criminal record meant that the sentence could be even higher.
“He’s facing the possibility of an extremely harsh sentence,” he said. “Second-degree felonies are normally reserved for aggravated assault, and to apply it to Mr. Rogers’s case, it just shows how unjust that is.”
Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, who is under investigation for professional misconduct after he challenged President Biden’s win in court, brought the charges against Mr. Rogers. He has made it a mission of his office to prosecute voter-fraud cases, which are very rare in the United States and tend to be minor mistakes when they do happen.
“Hervis is a felon rightly barred from voting under TX law,” Mr. Paxton wrote on Twitter. “I prosecute voter fraud everywhere we find it!”