As Donald Trump falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, Republicans in some states launched special units to prosecute voter fraud as part of a high-profile and controversial push to stamp out cheating some claimed was rampant.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
All of the convictions occurred in Florida, Texas and Ohio, while units in Virginia, Georgia and Arkansas failed to obtain a single guilty verdict, despite allocating dozens of staffers and millions of dollars to ferret out voter fraud.
The Post created the first comprehensive look at the work of election integrity units that were rolled out or ramped up after 2020 by compiling a database of nearly every prosecution — 136 in total — that the divisions pursued in Florida, Texas, Georgia, Virginia, Ohio and Arkansas.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement that The Post was “promoting a false narrative” because it was unable to determine the race or political affiliation for about half the prosecutions in his state.
The Post was able to compile a nearly complete list of prosecutions in six states through filing public records requests with the units, interviewing officials, scouring news releases and media reports, and consulting a database of voter-fraud convictions maintained by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
Last year, a jury acquitted former Edinburg mayor Richard Molina, who is a Latino Democrat, of a scheme to orchestrate voter fraud in 2017 in a case that originated with Paxton’s office.
Hart, a White man and convicted sex offender from Tampa, said he was at the DMV in March 2020, when a worker hired by the local county asked him if he wanted to register to vote.
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