Hervis Rogers was ineligible to cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential primary because he was still on parole, according to the state’s attorney general. He now faces four decades in prison.
A 62-year-old Texas man who waited hours to cast a ballot in last year’s presidential primary was arrested this week on charges that he had voted illegally. The man, Hervis Earl Rogers of Houston, waited seven hours outside Texas Southern University to vote in the state’s presidential primary in March 2020. On Wednesday, he was arrested and charged with two counts of illegal voting, a felony. According to court documents, the charges stem from ballots that Mr. Rogers cast on March 3,2020, and on Nov.6,2018, while he was still on parole and not legally permitted to vote. Tommy Buser-Clancy, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and one of the lawyers representing Mr. Rogers, said that Mr. Rogers thought that he could vote during the primary. “Mr. Rogers’s prosecution really shows the danger of overcriminalizing the election code and the process of participating in a democratic society,” he said. “In particular, it raises the danger that criminal statutes in the election code are being used to go after individuals who at worse have made an innocent mistake. That’s not what any laws should be doing.” Mr. Buser-Clancy said that the A.C.L.U. was conducting its own investigation into the charges. Texas election code states that a person convicted of a felony can register to vote and participate in elections only once his or her sentence — including parole — is fully completed.
