You are a damn ADULT..... you should know!!! There aren't too many people going to believe that he didn't know. Of course you knew.
Arrested, jailed, charged with a felony — for voting. ( Illegal voting)
Whitney Brown (left) and Keith Sellars are among 12 people being prosecuted in North Carolina.
As his girls cried in the back seat, Sellars was handcuffed and taken to jail.
His crime: Illegal voting.
“I didn’t know,” said Sellars, who spent the night in jail before his family paid his $2,500 bond. “I thought I was practicing my right.”
Sellars, 44, is one of a dozen people in Alamance County in North Carolina who have been charged with voting illegally in the 2016 presidential election. All were on probation or parole for felony convictions, which in North Carolina and many other states disqualifies a person from voting. If convicted, they face up to two years in prison.
A
HuffPost/YouGov poll shows almost half of Republicans believe there was
widespread voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election, even though
the White House says they do not have proof.
Media: Buzz 60
Media: Buzz 60
The cases are rare compared with the tens of millions of votes cast in state and national elections. In 2017, at least 11 people nationwide were convicted of illegal voting because they were felons or noncitizens, according to a database of voting prosecutions compiled by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Others have been convicted of voting twice, filing false registrations or casting a ballot for a family member.
The case against the 12 voters in Alamance County — a patchwork of small towns about an hour west of the state’s booming Research Triangle — is unusual for the sheer number of people charged at once. And because nine of the defendants are black, the case has touched a nerve in a state with a history of suppressing Africa American votes.
Local civil-rights groups and black leaders have urged the district attorney to drop the prosecution, saying that black voters were being disproportionately punished for an unwitting mistake. African Americans in North Carolina are more likely to be disqualified from voting because of felony convictions; their rate of incarceration is more than four times that of white residents, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit organization.
“It smacks of Jim Crow,” said Barrett Brown, head of the Alamance County NAACP. Referring to the district attorney, he added, “I don’t think he targeted black people. But if you cast that net, you’re going to catch more African Americans.”
Nadolski said that race and ethnicity are not a factor in any case he prosecutes.
The case has become part of a partisan war over voting rights before this November’s midterm elections. At a rally Tuesday, President Donald Trump — who has made baseless claims that millions of people voted illegally in 2016 — renewed his calls for laws requiring voters to show photo identification.
Jack Healy is a New York Times writer.
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