Dec 16, 2021 - News

Voter fraud arrests in The Villages

Illustration of a senior man wearing 3 "I voted" stickers.

Illustration: Allie Carl/Axios

Three senior residents of The Villages retirement area in central Florida are in trouble for allegedly casting multiple votes in the 2020 presidential election.

  • Jay Ketcik, 71, Joan Halstead, 63, and John Rider, 61, face felony charges for casting more than one vote in an election.

Why it matters: Republican lawmakers, sounding the alarm bells over election fraud after 2020, have passed new laws that will make voting harder for some Floridians.

Yes, but: The residents arrested under existing law were registered Republicans at the time of the last election and their social media pages are littered with pro-Trump messages, per the Orlando Sentinel.

  • All three are accused of voting both in Florida and in their home states — New York, Michigan and an unknown state.

Driving the news: Sumter County Supervisor of Elections Bill Keen, who launched the investigation into voting irregularities, declined to comment about the cases.

The big picture: Voter fraud is incredibly rare. Between 2000 and 2020 there were no prosecutions in Brevard, Lake, Marion or Sumter counties, per News 6 in Orlando.

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