A Texas man was arrested on charges that he voted in the 2020 Democratic primary while on parole. He could face as much as 20 years in prison.
Voting Rights And Voter Fraud,2020 Election,Texas,Elections
Hervis Rogers was so intent on casting a ballot in last year’s presidential primary that he waited six hours to vote, catching the attention of a CNN news crew when he became the last person to do so at his Houston polling place.
Rogers, now 62, debated leaving, he told CNN’s Ed Lavandera as he exited a polling center at Texas Southern University after midnight on March 4. “But I said to myself, ‘Nah. Don’t do that.’ It was set up for me to walk away, but I said, ‘No, I’m not going to do that.’ ”
More than a year later, Rogers was arrested on charges that he voted in last year’s Democratic primary while on parole. Under Texas law, it is illegal for a felon to “knowingly” vote while still serving a sentence, including parole. Doing so is a second-degree felony, punishable with a minimum of two years and a maximum of 20 years in prison. In at least 20 states, Rogers’s alleged vote would not be a crime.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who ordered the arrest, defended the charges on social media Friday night, tweeting, “Hervis is a felon rightly barred from voting under TX law . . . I prosecute voter fraud everywhere we find it!”
But Rogers’s lawyers and civil rights advocates argue that Rogers was not aware that he was ineligible to vote, meaning he should not be charged with “knowingly” committing fraud. His willingness to stand in line for six hours and submit to a cable-news interview proves it, they said.
“He’s really devastated,” said Andre Segura, the legal director for the ACLU of Texas and one of Rogers’s lawyers. “He does not want to go back to jail.”
Critics also questioned the timing of Rogers’s arrest last Wednesday, a day before the Texas Legislature convened for a special session to consider new voting restrictions that Democrats blocked in May. The legislation — one of the most far-reaching election proposals in the country — would, among other things, enact new criminal penalties for mistakes such as errors on mail ballots.
