Election skeptic found not guilty after being accused of trying to vote twice

NELSON COUNTY, Va. - A jury in this bright-red corner of rural Virginia found an avid Donald Trump fan not guilty of attempted illegal voting in a one-day trial Monday, accepting the man’s claim that he was only trying to test the election system for voter fraud when he asked to vote a second time in local elections last year.

Richardson Carter Bell, 67, admitted to police that he voted early at the Nelson County registrar’s office on Nov. 4, 2023 - then lined up with voters at his local polling place on Election Day three days later, presenting his driver’s license at the check-in table and confirming his name and address to the poll worker.

“I was messing [with them] to see if they were gonna let me vote again, to see what kind of fraud is going on,” Bell told State Police investigators who later questioned him in a recorded interview played for jurors in Nelson County Circuit Court.

Defense attorney Matthew L. Pack contended that Bell would not have gone through with voting more than once in the same election - a felony punishable by one to five years in prison - if poll workers had actually handed him a ballot. As it happened, the workers quickly discovered that he had already voted and turned him away.

Commonwealth’s Attorney Daniel L. Rutherford cast doubt on that claim, as did Circuit Court Judge Michael R. Doucette, the latter outside the jury’s presence. Rutherford insisted that Bell had not just planned to vote twice but had taken an affirmative step - by handing over his license - to further that aim.

But jurors acquitted Bell after a little more than an hour’s deliberation.

The trial played out in a quaint antebellum courthouse 100 miles northwest of Richmond, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains but hardly isolated from the fears that national- and state-level Republicans have been stoking about election fraud and illegal voting.

Trump, who has been pushing false claims that Democrats stole the White House for nearly four years, warns that Democrats will cheat in the Nov. 5 election, when he faces Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), while insisting that Virginia elections are secure, has fed concerns about illegal voting by claiming that he has purged the state’s voter rolls of thousands of people who identified themselves as “noncitizens” at the state Department Motor Vehicles.

The Department of Justice, which sued to stop the removals in the home stretch of the election, contends in its lawsuit that fully qualified voters have been caught up in Youngkin’s purge, including those who skipped the citizenship question on DMV forms or those who became citizens years after their first interaction with the DMV. A federal judge Friday ordered Virginia to restore more than 1,600 voter registrations that she said were illegally purged in the past two months - a ruling upheld by a federal appeals court Sunday. Youngkin is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Despite warnings from Trump, Youngkin and other Republicans, illegal voting is extremely rare in Virginia and nationally, experts say. Bell is one of only three people charged with illegal voting of any kind in Virginia since Youngkin took office nearly three years ago, according to a review of statewide court records by The Washington Post.

A Goochland County voter was accused of voting more than once; that case was dismissed. The other case involved a felon whose voting rights had not been restored when he voted in 2021 in Norfolk; a Democrat, he pleaded guilty. None of those cases involved a question of citizenship.

Bell, a watercolor artist, sign-maker and restorer of vintage cars, was well known in the area as an ardent fan of the 45th president long before the trial. He wound up on the local TV news in December 2022 for driving a truck emblazoned with an anti-Biden message in the annual Christmas parade. The move upset some residents, who thought the political message was out of place at a holiday celebration.

Bell arrived at the courthouse Monday in a blue pickup festooned with American flags, a banner bearing Trump’s face and an enormous Trump sign topped with a saying attributed to the late country singer Toby Keith: “Never apologize for being a patriot.”

He did not testify in his own defense, sitting quietly at the defense table, with about 30 residents watching in the gallery.

Rutherford put local election officials and two State Police special investigators on the stand, playing a recording the police made when they arrived at Bell’s house in February to say they were looking into allegations that he had tried to vote again at the Carriage House, a local event space used as a polling place.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he is heard saying. “It must be somebody else. … Somebody’s committing fraud, and it isn’t me. I don’t like nobody else using my name for voting.”

But as the conversation continues, Bell acknowledges showing up at the polls three days after voting early but says he never intended to vote. He explains his actions to the police as “a joke” and a test of the system.

“I was doing a little detective work,” he says. “I went in there … to see if they would take me and let me vote again because I was interested in seeing how many times people could get away with that and, um, yeah, I did do that. That’s right, I remember now.”

Pack claimed that Nelson County Registrar Jacqueline Britt, who alerted law enforcement to Bell’s actions, was targeting the defendant because she considered him a “local agitator,” “rabble rouser” and “nutcase” who needed someone to “cool him down,” he said, reading from her statement to police. Britt testified that she did not recall those comments but allowed that she might have described him in that way.

Pack also argued that Bell wound up on trial because poll workers turned him away instead of offering him a provisional ballot. Bell would have refused the provisional ballot and would not “be here” - in court, facing a criminal charge - if the election workers had only offered it, Pack said while the jury was temporarily out of the courtroom.

“I think we would be here in spades,” the judge shot back, suggesting that he thought Bell would have taken the ballot, voted - and then be facing a charge of illegal voting instead of attempted illegal voting. “The case would be much more serious,” Doucette added.

The jury came back with a not-guilty verdict after deliberating for about an hour - but then went back into deliberations after one juror said he hadn’t voted not guilty.

The judge asked them to keep trying for a unanimous verdict, and they returned about five minutes later to say they had again reached a not-guilty verdict. This time when the judge polled the individual jurors, each one confirmed it.

Bell, who walks with a red, white and blue cane, leaned forward on the defense table and appeared overcome with emotion after the jurors confirmed the verdict. He gave a few little waves to them as they filed out.

Although he did not take the stand, Bell repeated the argument his lawyer made after he walked out of the courtroom, saying he was just testing the system. While the system worked - alerting poll workers that he had already cast a vote - he remains a skeptic.

He wants early voting, expanded during the pandemic, done away with - even though he used it again this year to cast his ballot for president before the trial. Had he been convicted of the felony, he would have lost his right to vote by Election Day.

“I was just checking my vote because all that stuff you see in the news about voter fraud, which is being committed every day,” he told The Post outside the courtroom. “If it wasn’t for covid we wouldn’t have this problem. We would have one-day voting all the time. And I hope Trump brings that back.