A second arrest has been made on the man who will be the first person in Florida to stand trial for voting in the 2020 election.
Nathan Hart, a guy from Gibsonton, was taken into custody on Thursday for making false claims under oath.
According to the arrest records kept by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, Hart was taken into custody by sheriff’s officers on a warrant when they were serving it at his residence.
Prior to this, Hart was taken into custody in the month of August as part of the initial series of arrests that followed the establishment of an elections police unit. The announcement that twenty people would be charged with voter fraud was made by the governor, Ron DeSantis.
After the approval of a constitutional amendment that would automatically reinstate voting rights for criminals who completed their sentences and fulfilled their financial commitments to the state, all of them registered to vote. However, the amendment did not apply to those who had been convicted of murder or sexual offenses.
The charges against Hart at the time of his arrest in August included improperly registering to vote in March
2020 and then voting in the presidential election. Hart was among those who were detained in August. It’s important to note that he joined the Republican party.
On his application, Hart affirmed a statement that declared “I am not a convicted felon, and if I am, my right to vote has been restored.” This declaration read: “I am not a convicted felon, and if I am, my right to vote has been restored.”
According to the warrant that was issued for Hart in August, he was found guilty in 2006 of committing lewd and lascivious molestation. The fact that this was the case meant that he should not have had his voting privileges reinstated.
He made the decision to go to trial instead of accepting a plea bargain. During the course of the trial, he made the assertion that someone had informed him, while he was waiting outside of a driver’s license office, that he was ineligible to vote and that he needed to register.
According to a report published by The Guardian at the time, a jury found him not guilty of deliberately voting unlawfully but did find that he had misled on his voter registration application. After that, he was given a probationary sentence of five years duration.
The state’s efforts to crack down on those voting illegally have been stepped up. A new piece of legislation that has already been signed into law grants a statewide prosecutor the authority to handle accusations of vote fraud across the state, and under DeSantis’s leadership, the Legislature has continued to fund a specialized election police unit.
