Brenda Snipes’ office mixed bad provisional ballots with good ones miamiherald.com/news/local/com…
Broward’s elections supervisor accidentally mixed more than a dozen rejected ballots with nearly 200 valid ones, a circumstance that is unlikely to help Brenda Snipes push back against Republican allegations of incompetence.
On Election Day, Broward County collected more than 600 provisional ballots. The vast majority were declared invalid by the county’s canvassing board judges for reasons ranging from registering to vote too late to previously voting to voting at the wrong precinct.
But a couple hundred provisional ballots were held in limbo. Those ballots were the result of a connectivity issue in the system that precincts use to look up voter registrations, said Pat Nesbit, the elections day operations manager for Broward County.
Voters would swipe their ID and the precinct system would show they weren’t registered voters. But when staffers called the Broward elections headquarters, the voter’s registration would appear. Precinct workers had those 205 voters fill out provisional ballots.
On Election Day, Broward election staffers set those 205 votes aside, removed the anonymous ballots from their signed envelopes and counted them up in a voting machine that didn’t add those numbers to the final vote count.
On Friday, the three-person canvassing board — on which Snipes usually sits — found about 20 of those 205 votes had mismatched signatures and declared them illegal.
That means there are at least 20 illegal votes mixed into an anonymous pile of 205, all sitting in a machine that counted them but did not add them to the final count.
“The ballots cannot be identified,” Snipes confirmed when a lawyer for the Republican Party asked.
Republican Party lawyers immediately pressed Snipes about the future of those 205 votes and if they’d be counted.
Republican Party lawyers immediately pressed Snipes about the future of those 205 votes and if they’d be counted.
Snipes declined to answer and continued judging signatures on remaining ballots. There is no statute guiding what happens next.
How tough was it to set aside the 20 invalid ballots in a manner where they weren’t confused with the rest? It would only take a little physical separation to keep the two sets separate. Even a child could manage that task.
At best this is rank incompetence. At worst, it looks like an attempt to evade the signature requirements that prevent voter fraud from impacting election results.
The problem with chalking it up to incompetence in Broward is that Broward’s track record of “mistakes” in elections are so aggressively incompetent — and all in the same direction.
Put that together with Snipes’ refusal to comply with court orders demanding that she follow Florida election law and report outstanding ballot totals, and it doesn’t look like incompetence at all. It looks like deliberate corruption.
As of 11 am ET this morning, the gaps in the two Florida races look stable.
Ron DeSantis still leads by 36,000 votes in the gubernatorial race, and Rick Scott’s lead in the Senate race is just under 15,000 votes. Those leads are far too large to get reversed in a recount, unless Brenda Snipes gets put in charge of it.
