LANSING, MICHIGAN — NOVEMBER 03: Voters fill out their ballots at a school gymnasium on November 03, 2020 in Lansing, Michigan (John Moore/Getty Images). Inset: Robert Henry Rivernider, Jr. (via Sumter County (Fla.) Sheriff’s Office).
A Florida man sentenced to jail for using his dead father’s ballot to fraudulently cast a vote in the 2020 presidential election will be fighting multiple legal battles from behind bars.
Robert Henry Rivernider Jr., 58 — a leader of a political organization supporting Donald Trump — was accused of signing his father’s name to a vote-by-mail ballot in the 2020 presidential election. Rivernider reportedly ran a group called “Villagers for Trump,” linked to the famously pro-Donald Trump community The Villages in Central Florida.
As Law&Crime previously reported, three residents of The Villages were charged with voting multiple times in the 2020 election. Trump himself has amplified disproved conspiracy theories that voter fraud swayed the election in favor of President Joe Biden, much to his own legal detriment.
The telltale ballot was allegedly postmarked after the older man’s death, but investigators determined that the signature more closely matched that of Rivernider.
The complaint from Sumter County elections supervisor William Keen, filed in August 2023, reads as follows:
Robert Henry Rivernider, Jr. is alleged to have signed the vote by mail ballot for his deceased father Robert Henry Rivernider, S. Robert Henry Rivernider, Sr. is believed to have died on October 19, 2020. The Vote By Mail envelop for Sr. was signed and dated October 16, 2020, but postmarked on 10-23-2020. Sr’s Vote By Mail envelope was received by the Supervisor of Elections on 10-26-2020. Since the postmarked date was after the date of the death, the ballot was not counter. However, based on comparison of signatures for both Jr. and Sr. there appear to be similarities between the signatures in the 2020 election that match Jr.’s signature, but not prior versions of Sr.’s signature. On information and belief, it is alleged that Jr. signed the ballot of Sr. in the 2020 election.
Rivernider was found guilty by a jury on Dec. 5 of forgery and fraud in connection with casting a vote and was sentenced Tuesday to six months in jail.
Jury conviction notwithstanding, however, Rivernider has filed multiple lawsuits stemming from his prosecution.
In an “emergency complaint for declaratory judgment” filed on Dec. 15, Rivernider requested a ruling “to permit and allow [him] to open mail and all correspondents in the name, and all different variations, he has become known as, has used all his life, and is typically identified as.”
He describes his conviction as being based on “the crime of ‘probably’ signing an envelope that was mailed to the home [Rivernider] lived in and shared with his father.” Noting that his father was also named Robert H. Rivernider, he essentially argues that it was “difficult, if not impossible at times, to determine whose mail was whose even after opening it.”
Rivernider noted that his father “was murdered by the United States government’s creation and spreading of a bioweapon known as COVID-10 on October 19, 2020.”
On Jan. 2, he sued one of the prosecutors in his case, Joseph O. Church, for filing “false information in state court that caused [Rivernider] to have to raise bail money.” Rivernider is seeking $2,500 in compensation. He claims to be suing the prosecutor “in his private capacity” for the statement that “the whereabouts of the defendant is unknown,” because that caused the bond amount to go up.
Rivernider argues that Church knew where he was “as he was interviewed twice locally on TV and held several political rallies in Sumter County just days and weeks earlier with another scheduled just days later openly advertised on his website and in local news sources.”
However, Rivernider may have to defend himself against defamation claims by Thomas Jamieson and Valerie Jamieson, who run the pro-Trump Villages MAGA Club in The Villages, Florida. According to the complaint, filed in November, Rivernider, in an October newsletter published on Substack, publicly accused them of money laundering and said that donations to the club would be “lining [their] pockets.”
According to prosecutors, Rivernider has more than a dozen prior convictions, including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
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