MAGA attorney gets three years after voter fraud conviction in Ohio
A Trump-supporting tax attorney in Shaker Heights, Ohio has been sentenced to three years for illegally voting twice, reported the Cleveland Scene.
This comes a week after the attorney, 53-year-old James Saunders, was convicted.
"Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Andrew Santoli coupled Saunders' sentence with a $10,000 fine, a punishment, as Santoli detailed in last week's hearing, to match the severe violation against the nation's voting laws," reported Mark Oprea. "'You violated the premise that every citizen, regardless of race, creed or religion, speaks in one voice,' Santoli told Saunders from the bench last Monday. 'Your opinion does not outweigh other citizens.'"
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According to prior reports, Santoli illegally cast ballots in both Ohio and Florida, first in the 2020 presidential election, then in the 2022 midterm election.
Individual ballot fraud is an exceptionally rare crime in the United States due to all the safeguards in place to prevent it from happening. Nonetheless, it does happen occasionally, and Republicans have used it to justify harsher and harsher laws limiting the way voters can verify their identity at the polls, a move critics have argued is a deliberate attempt to make it harder for younger and nonwhite people to exercise their voting rights.
Ironically, a number of Trump supporters have been caught engaging in this behavior. A Republican from Forty Fort, Pennsylvania was arrested in 2020 for trying to cast a ballot in the name of his deceased mother. And in 2021, multiple Republicans from The Villages retirement communities in Florida were prosecuted for illegal use of absentee ballots.