Tarus Mack kept his seat on the Eatonville Town Council by one vote in March, but challenger Marlin Daniels filed a lawsuit last month alleging voter fraud and asking for the results to be thrown out.
Allegations of election fraud are a familiar controversy for the tiny town of 2,300 people that spans just one square mile near Winter Park and Maitland. And the complaint filed in court by Daniels includes allegations related to a well-known figure in Eatonville — former Mayor Anthony Grant, who was convicted of felony voter fraud in 2017.
In the court documents, Daniels alleges that Grant asked at least one resident of a motel he owns to vote for Mack in exchange for a break on rent.
Grant vehemently denied the allegations.
After the polls closed on the evening of March 17, Daniels appeared to have ousted Mack by a razor thin margin before mail-in ballots were counted. But a recount by the Orange County Canvassing Board later showed Mack kept his seat with 269 votes to Daniels’ 268 votes. The canvassing board and Mack are both named as defendants in the lawsuit filed by Daniels.
Mack could not be reached for comment but filed a response in court Wednesday and said he had no knowledge of the allegations against Grant.
In an affidavit, William J. Sheketoff, 68, said his car broke down about a month before the election so he couldn’t keep his job delivering food and earn enough money to pay rent.
Sheketoff said Grant came to the motel on Election Day and offered him and another tenant a ride to the polling place. Before they went inside, Grant allegedly gave them a sample ballot with the names of Mack and Seat 5 candidate Angie Gardner highlighted and said, “this is who I would like you to vote for,” according to court documents.
Sheketoff said he believed Grant wouldn’t evict him if he voted for those candidates.
“I did vote for Tarus Mack and Angie Gardner that day,” he said in court records,” but I would not have voted that day if Grant had not arranged my transport and influenced my vote.”
A week later, Sheketoff said Grant demanded the past due rent payment and ordered a motel employee to put a lock on his door when he couldn’t pay.
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“This vote alone changed the course of the election for the seat, but there are others,”attorneys for Daniels wrote in the complaint.
Grant, who is not named as a defendant in Daniels’ lawsuit, said this week that the accusations in the court filing are false and said Sheketoff has not been evicted from the motel.
“It’s interesting a week later, because he thought he was getting evicted, for him to make some false allegations,” he told the Sentinel.
Grant served as mayor from 1994 to 2009 in Eatonville, known as the birthplace of author Zora Neale Hurston and depicted in her novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” He won the seat again in 2015 against Bruce Mount after receiving an overwhelming number of absentee votes. Mount filed a lawsuit against Grant but it was dismissed on a technicality.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement launched its own investigation, which led to Grant’s conviction in 2017 when he was sentenced to four years of probation related to felony voting fraud and a misdemeanor absentee-voting violation. He can no longer serve in public office because he has a felony conviction.
Daniels, who works for the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, also alleges in the suit that a large number of votes came from people using the same voter registration address and that their ballots were cast illegally. He also asserts that several mail-in ballots shouldn’t have been counted because signatures didn’t match.
Orange supervisor Bill Cowles previously said there were six mail ballots from town residents that were either missing a signature or there was no signature match. Three of those voters resolved the issue by the deadline and Mack picked up two votes to narrowly win the race by one.
Daniels is asking for the court to declare him as the seat winner or invalidate the election results and “award any other relief that is just and necessary.”
This story originally appeared on OrlandoSentinel.com.
lgarza@orlandosentinel.com
