Ninth sentence handed down in cases of felons charged with registering or voting from Alachua County Jail

Staff report

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Christopher Timothy Wiggins, 54, was sentenced today to four concurrent sentences of one year and one week in prison, with credit for 327 days served, after entering a plea of nolo contendere to two counts of false swearing on a voter registration application and two counts of willfully voting as an unqualified elector.

Wiggins is one of ten men who were charged with false swearing and/or fraudulent voting after a representative from Supervisor of Elections Kim Barton’s office visited the jail on several occasions in 2020 to register voters.

Wiggins was charged with falsely swearing on a voter registration application on both July 15 and September 30, 2020. He was arrested in July 2019 for a February 2019 armed robbery; at the time, he already had seven felony convictions. He remained in the Alachua County Jail until June 2021, when he was sentenced to 11 years in state prison on the armed robbery charge. He voted by mail from the jail in both the primary and general elections in 2020.

Wiggins was transported from a state prison to the Alachua County Jail in July 2022 to face the voter fraud charges, so he only has about 45 days left in the sentence, which will be served concurrently with the 11-year sentence.

Wiggins is also a suspect in the February 2019 disappearance of Jasmine Robinson, which happened within days of the armed robbery. Robinson reportedly told her family that Wiggins, who was married, was the father of her unborn baby, and she said Wiggins wanted her to get an abortion, but she wanted to keep the baby. Robinson received several upsetting calls at work on the day she disappeared and left her home sometime that night, carrying only her phone, without telling anyone where she was going. She has not been seen since.

Wiggins is the ninth convicted felon to be sentenced for voter fraud charges

Dedrick Baldwin and Therris Conney were sentenced to 364 days in July 2022, Daniel Roberts was sentenced in June to three years in state prison, and Arthur Lang was sentenced to 18 months in state prison a few days later, all on similar charges. Henry Shuler was sentenced to one year and seven days in August 2022. Xavier Artis was sentenced to 13 months in prison on February 14, 2023. John Boyd Rivers was sentenced to two years of probation after a jury trial on May 16. All of these defendants except Lang are serving the sentences concurrent with their previous sentences; Lang’s sentence extended his release date by eight months.

One defendant, Kelvin Bolton, still has an open case.