There were six people fined by the city of Washington, D.C. this week for voting twice in the 2020 election. One of them was an elected official.
Vanessa Rubio, who was chosen as an advisory neighborhood commissioner, was given a $500 fine by the city after running for president in 2020 in Maryland and Washington, D.C. Rubio got a bigger $500 fine than the other people who did it because he is an elected official. Each of the other people got a $100 fine.
The District of Columbia Board of Elections said they were told she voted in person in Washington, D.C., but she denied that she had voted in Maryland. Rubio did say, though, that she signed a Maryland voter registration card and that it was possible she had voted in Maryland but didn’t remember.
“Finally, Ms. Rubio stated that it was ‘never really stated that you are not able to vote in more than one state,’ and that she thought that if one attempted to do so, the ‘system’ would block one from doing so,” the board’s order said, NBC News reported.
The other five have also said they voted in both Maryland and Washington, D.C., but they say they did it by accident.
Voter fraud, or voting twice by chance, doesn’t happen very often. Former President Donald Trump said there was a lot of voter fraud in the 2020 election, but officials say the number of real cases of voter fraud is statistically small.
The six voters in Washington, D.C., who cast their ballots twice by accident also don’t affect the outcome of the race. With more than 300,000 votes, President Joe Biden won the seat. In Maryland, Biden won with about 1.98 million votes, while Trump only got 976,000.
Two more cases of voting twice in the 2020 general election are still being looked into by the Board of Elections for the District of Columbia.