MANATEE COUNTY, Fla. — A Florida man says he was just "testing the system" when he requested a vote-by-mail ballot for his dead wife. Investigators say he was caught and arrested.
The Manatee County Sheriff's Office says Larry Wiggins, 62, is now facing a third-degree felony charge for requesting a vote-by-mail ballot on behalf of another elector.
It all started when the Manatee County Supervisor of Elections Mike Bennett called the sheriff's office when he and his staff got mail-in-ballot requests from a husband and wife at the same address, according to investigators. What made them suspicious about this was the request for the woman’s ballot had a different handwriting style from her original voter registration, deputies said.
Not only did the sheriff's office compare the signatures and determine they did not match, but they also found out the woman had died in 2018
Deputies said Wiggins admitted to them he had requested a mail-in-ballot for his dead wife, and he did it because he was, “testing the system to see if it worked.”
Wiggins was arrested Thursday.
Attempted voter fraud is rare nationwide and in Manatee County.
"It's pretty rare. Not enough to swing an election normally, but I got to tell you even one fraudulent vote really, really upsets me and so we will prosecute to the full extent of the law," Bennett said.
A 2020 Washington Post analysis of mail-in voting in three states for the 2016 and 2018 general elections found just 372 "possible cases" of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased individuals out of roughly 14.6 million votes that were cast. For context, that's a rate of about 0.0025 percent.
Nationwide, it becomes even more clear how rare fraud attempts are. According to NPR, more than 250 million ballots have been cast by mail in the U.S. over the last two decades. Of those, there have been just 143 criminal convictions for some form of fraud. That's a fraud rate of 0.00006 percent, the outlet reports.
This election cycle, Manatee County has seen only two instances where a questionable vote-by-mail ballot request was made. Both situations were quickly spotted by the elections office, and one of them was Wiggins' case.
"Our state attorney's office down here, and our sheriff's office are working with us to prosecute those people who decide they want to try to cheat the system," Bennett said. "There's very few things that we have in our country that are more important to me and you than the right to vote and we want to have it fair."
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