Weeks before voters return to the polls, prominent figures in St. Johns County politics are facing criminal charges over complaints about phony voter guides from the 2024 elections.
County commissioners Sarah Arnold and Christian Whitehurst and St. Augustine Beach Commissioner Dylan Rumrell were charged in a July 6 court filing with creating unauthorized voter guides, a first-degree misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail, as well as second-degree conspiracy charges.
Political campaign pro Brianna Jordan and a woman who worked for her, Jamie Johnson, face the same charges, plus Jordan was charged with evidence tampering, a felony that’s based on statements that Jordan burned some bogus voter guides after they drew election-season TV news coverage.
Summonses were issued July 7 for Arnold, Whitehurst, Rumrell and Johnson to appear for arraignment Aug. 3 at the county’s judicial center on Lewis Speedway.
A spokesman for attorneys representing the officeholders said claims in the charges “have lingered for nearly two years in the hands of various government agencies” and the defendants “look forward to the conclusion of this matter and will have no further comments.”
The charges don’t appear to trigger automatic consequences for the officeholders, none of whom are on ballot in the county’s Aug. 18 elections.
State law lets Gov. Ron DeSantis suspend local elected officials charged with felonies or “a misdemeanor related to the duties of office,” but it’s not clear whether that would include a misdemeanor related to campaigning.
The case grew out of a rift between candidates and Republican Party leaders in the heavily Republican county, where the Republican Executive Committee complained to the state Office of Election Crimes and Security that the committee’s logo was hijacked in the summer of 2024 to help candidates it hadn’t endorsed.
The committee had printed and circulated 20,000 voter guides identifying its favored candidates, but in early August 2024 the committee began hearing complaints about another guide with different candidate picks, according to an affidavit from a Florida Department of Law Enforcement agent assigned to the election crimes office.
About 135 complaints rolled into the executive committee, said the affidavit, which reported the bogus guides included the names of 10 candidates the committee hadn’t supported.
Eight of those candidates had hired companies that Jordan controlled to work on their campaigns, the affidavit said.
The affidavit argued that “Jordan developed a scheme to negate the … [committee’s] endorsement of the opposing candidates,” saying she created a voter guide that mimicked the committee’s logo, just reversing the original white lettering on red background to red lettering on a white background. The affidavit said Jordan didn’t include language that’s required by state law, identifying who paid to create the guide.
The affidavit said people from some of the candidate campaigns met at a house in St. Augustine for a “secret envelope stuffing” operation and that Jordan had lined up about 10,000 bogus voter guides and 20,000 stamps so they could be sealed, stamped and mailed without leaving marks from postage meters that might be used later to trace who sent them out.
The agent who prepared the affidavit, Adam Graff, wrote that in addition to the officeholders who were charged, he interviewed people from campaigns for candidates that included sheriff hopeful Jim Priester and Florida House candidate Nick Primrose.
Graff wrote that Priester hadn’t stuffed any envelopes but was later given some envelopes to mail. He wrote that a volunteer from Primrose’s campaign reported the phony guide to his campaign and that Primrose called Jordan, confronted her about the guides and ended his contract with her.
Rumrell “denied any involvement with the fraudulent voter guides” except for getting one in the mail, said the affidavit, which quoted other people saying Rumrell was at the stuffing session.
The affidavit said Arnold and Whitehurst were at the stuffing event and brought relatives to help.
Graff wrote in the affidavit that he also interviewed Garrett Davis, described as an intern for Jordan who had a lawyer and “had been provided with a use immunity agreement by the Office of Statewide Prosecution.” Davis was mentioned in the conspiracy portion of the charging document, called an information, but he was not criminally charged.
This story has been updated to include a dropped word.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: St. Johns County politicians facing charges over phony voter guides
Reporting by Steve Patterson, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union / Florida Times-Union
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Steve Patterson, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union | USA TODAY Network
