Updated - Laws broken in Broward County by Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes
Monday I first brought you this story depicting each law violated by Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes. Predictably news media, aside from me, have continued to fail to bring you the truth. Now that the machine recount is behind us, here’s a recap of the laws broken based on Florida's laws. Click here for the entire code.
The supervisor of elections shall upload into the county’s election management system by 7 p.m. on the day before the election the results of all early voting and vote-by-mail ballots that have been canvassed and tabulated by the end of the early voting period.
That didn’t happen, nor was any expedited effort made to attempt to comply with the law. Early votes and votes-by-mail were still being tabulated in Broward on Friday and Saturday. In other words, not only was this illegal, it was a blatant disregard for the law.
Another broken was: The canvassing board shall report all early voting and all tabulated vote-by-mail results to the Department of State within 30 minutes after the polls close. Nope, didn’t follow that law either. That’s two.
Thereafter, the canvassing board shall report, with the exception of provisional ballot results, updated precinct election results to the department at least every 45 minutes until all results are completely reported. The supervisor of elections shall notify the department immediately of any circumstances that do not permit periodic updates as required.
Once again, not only did none of that occur, there was a blatant disregard for the law as no effort to come into compliance with it was ever made.
If the county canvassing board determines that the unofficial returns may contain a counting error in which the vote tabulation system failed to count votes that were properly marked in accordance with the instructions on the ballot, the county canvassing board shall:
(a) Correct the error and retabulate the affected ballots with the vote tabulation system
What happened, in this case, was a series of law-breaking maneuvers. The “corrective action” taken for these ballots, was for the Supervisor to unilaterally decide what voter intent was and have her staff fill out new ballots in their place. This is also illegal and blatant disregard for the law. Florida law mandates that the canvassing board make these decisions.
Art. V, § 5 of the Florida Constitution and the Public Records Act.
Last Friday, Broward’s Circuit Court found that Brenda Snipes violated that law in two additional ways related to that act. First, that it was unlawful to not provide a vote total for the election itemized by vote type. Additionally, it was found that Brenda broke the law by not being able to provide voter data publicly as mandated by Florida law. Compliance was ordered by 7 pm Friday Night. 7 pm came and went and no compliance occurred once again.
CONDUCTING ELECTIONS AND ASCERTAINING THE RESULTS -
When Brenda Snipes personally placed 22 disqualified votes into a batch of eligible qualifying votes and tabulated them into Broward’s count, she violated all related election laws.
That’s minimum of six laws broken and two court orders ignored. What’s more is that after hearing that the machine recount had been completed by Thursday’s deadline, the actual transfer of recounted information was made two minutes too late to count. Governor Rick Scott had picked up 779 votes in Broward’s recount that now isn’t being counted. They may not be illegal, but it also speaks for itself as to how Broward is being operated.
Those who lack morality or integrity might attempt to argue its simply incompetence. Even if that were the case it’s still illegal incompetence. But that’s also clearly not the case. Even if one is incompetent, once they’ve been notified of their incompetence and ordered to comply, one can control effort. When effort isn’t placed on compliance all doubt is removed. Also, as I’ve illustrated this week three of these violations arrive at the level of voter/electoral fraud under Florida law.
Photo by: Joe Skipper/Getty Images