Uh oh: Broward mixed the rejected ballots with the valid ones

The Broward election supervisor accidentally mixed more than a dozen rejected ballots with nearly 200 valid ballots, a circumstance that will likely not help Brenda Snipes to fight the charges. incompetence of Republicans.

The mistake – for which no one had the solution Friday night – was discovered after Snipes agreed to submit 205 provisional ballots to the Broward County Solicitation Committee for inspection. Initially, she had intended to process the ballots administratively, but agreed to present them to the soliciting office after Republican prosecutors objected.

"We have not found any clear authority controlling the situation the board is facing," said Broward County Attorney Andrew Meyers.

On polling day, Broward County collected over 600 provisional ballots. The vast majority has been invalidated by county solicitors for reasons ranging from registration to vote too late to the previous vote until voting in the wrong constituency.

But a few hundred provisional ballots were kept in limbo. These ballots are the result of a problem of connectivity in the system, which constituencies use to search for voter registrations, said Pat Nesbit, head of operations on polling day for Broward County. . Voters slipped their identities and the voting system showed that they were not registered voters. But when staff members called the Broward election headquarters, the voter registration appears. Polling station workers asked these 205 electors to fill in provisional ballots.

On polling day, Broward election officers reserved these 205 votes, removed the anonymous ballots from their signed envelopes and counted them in a voting device that did not add these numbers to the final vote count. The Election Department did not originally intend to have these votes reviewed by the solicitors' council, but after the outcry of Republican lawyers, the office handed them over to the council, who usually examines the ballots still in the envelopes.

On Friday, the three-person selection committee – on which Snipes usually sits – found that about 20 of those 205 votes had incompatible signatures and declared them illegal. This means that there are at least 20 illegal votes mixed in an anonymous stack of 205, all sitting in a machine that counted them but did not add them to the final count.

"The ballots can not be identified," Snipes confirmed at the request of a Republican party lawyer.

Republican party lawyers immediately insisted Snipes on the future of these 205 votes and the fact that they are counted. Snipes refused to answer and continued to judge the signatures on the remaining ballots. No law guides the future.

"This process does not exist, the process is that ballots are not open, and I would suggest to council that this process stop," said Leonard Collins, Florida Republican Party Lawyer.

Broward is expected to present his unofficial mid-term election vote to the state by Saturday at noon. Recounts are scheduled in the US Senate, governor and agriculture commissioner competitions, and Snipes has become a target for Republican politicians who allege corruption and incompetence after his office still has thousands of advance ballots missing and missing in the days following Tuesday's election.

The council ended Friday's meeting at about 10:30 pm, but the election supervisor has not yet announced his decision on how to process the ballots.

– Alex Harris