A Florida district judge has officially dubbed his own state “the laughingstock of the world” after election officials have repeatedly failed to prepare their offices for the tight races and recounts that Florida is known to have.
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker’s harsh criticism came just hours ahead of a 3 p.m. deadline for counties to submit the results of a recount in three races with razor-thin margins of victory.
The laughingstock of the whole world!
As the largest swing state in the nation, Florida’s election results tend to carry national implications. However, lawmakers have still failed to update outdated equipment or standardize voting procedures, leading to slow recounts and uncounted ballots.
Florida’s election woes go back to 2000, in the infamous presidential race between George W. Bush and former Vice President Al Gore. In that election, fallible human beings were forced to determine voter intent by looking at ballots with “hanging chads” that effectively obscured their decisions.
“We have been the laughing-stock of the world, election after election, and we chose not to fix this,” Walker said of Florida as several of the state’s counties have once again been subject to scrutiny over problems with voting and ballots.
Pure incompetence
In Palm Beach County, for instance, antique vote-counting equipment overheated and broke down as officials were conducting a recount of the U.S. Senate race, causing Susan Bucher, the county supervisor of elections, to lament: “If we had three or four more hours, we might have made” the court-ordered deadline to submit recount results.
“It’s not just equipment jamming there are a lot of issues that are involved,” said Uzoma Nkwonta, a lawyer representing Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson. “It’s [a] very precarious position that we are in… They can’t say how long it will take.”
In Broward County, election chief Brenda Snipes has also come under fire for maintaining inaccurate voter rolls and counting ineligible ballots while prematurely destroying others. Snipes has been named in multiple lawsuits questioning why her office added thousands of ballots after Election Day, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has started a criminal investigation into the county’s election procedures.
Meanwhile, Broward and Palm Beach Counties have been unable to keep up with the state’s 65 other counties when tallying ballots. Snipes and Bucher ignored state laws that required them to report preliminary election results to the Department of State within 30 minutes after polls closed, as well as missing updates every 45 minutes thereafter.
Refusing to budge
Ultimately, Judge Walker refused to extend the state’s machine recount deadline of Thursday at 3 p.m. for Palm Beach County.
“The relief I grant may not provide any relief at all,” Walker said, worried that if he extends the deadline, Bucher’s office would still fail to meet it. State law allows for the extension of election reporting deadlines, but only in the case of emergencies.
“The emergency exception does not apply in this case, where the delay is a result of outdated and malfunctioning vote-counting technology,” he wrote. Democrats were asking the judge to extend the recount deadline indefinitely, giving Palm Beach County as much time as they needed to count votes with their broken-down equipment, but Walker strongly rejected that request.
“This Court must be able to craft a remedy with knowledge that it will not prove futile. It cannot do so on this record,” Walker wrote in a six-page court order. “This Court does not and will not fashion a remedy in the dark.”
Republican Sen. Marco Rubio also condemned his state’s latest election fiasco in an opinion piece published by The Washington Examiner.
“I agree wholeheartedly that every vote cast in accordance with Florida’s law should be counted,” Rubio wrote. “But that is not at issue here. What is at issue is whether the outcome of this election or any election should hinge on which side can get the courts to change the laws after the fact.”
Fortunately, at least one federal judge will not be swayed.
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