On Tuesday, a resident of the Villages, Charles Barnes, was arrested for allegedly having voted more than once in the 2020 election. It was the fourth such arrest in the past month; in December, three others were arrested for having allegedly committed the same crime. In each case, the person is accused of having cast ballots from Florida but also other states where they had residences, including Michigan, New York and Connecticut. Three of the four were registered Republicans at the time of the election.

This, of course, is what voter fraud usually looks like: isolated examples of individuals casting more than one ballot. For all of former president Donald Trump’s sweeping allegations of rampant fraud mechanisms at play in myriad states to benefit Democrats, there’s not only no evidence that such conspiracies were undertaken but what we do know about the scattershot incidents in which illegal votes may have been cast suggests that it’s a bipartisan problem. In the modern political era, there are only rare examples of systematic efforts to swing elections with incidents of fraud far more often being a function of what appears to have happened in Florida.

But that it happened so often at the Villages is fascinating. This may simply be a function of population density. The Villages was the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the United States over the past decade, a surge in population so large that it helped pull Florida’s population center back to the northwest away from Miami. It has a lot of residents and a lot of new residents; when I was there in May, a display in one of the business offices for the Villages’s umbrella corporation (the Villages Operating Company) showed several dozen new arrivals that week alone. Get a lot of people in one place with dual residences and the odds of such behavior increase.