Long-embattled Florida elections supervisor faces fresh allegations of voter fraud after 2018 midterms

There’s something fishy going on in Broward County, Florida — and it’s not this season’s toxic red tide depositing dead marine animals along the state’s pristine beaches.

On Friday, Republican agriculture commissioner candidate Matt Caldwell filed a lawsuit accusing long-embattled Broward County elections supervisor Brenda Snipes of illegally counting more than 100,000 new ballots long after polls had closed on Tuesday.

Included in Caldwell’s complaint is a sworn affidavit from a Broward County Elections employee who said she witnessed her colleagues filling out blank ballots during the 2016 election, providing evidence that voter fraud coming out of the Democratic stronghold could be far worse than anyone suspected.

Ballot-stuffing in Broward?

Florida Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp shared a copy of the affidavit on Twitter to illustrate the history of irregularities from Broward County Elections. The undersigned, Chelsey Marie Smith, was a temporary clerk with the elections supervisor who described how she happened upon her co-workers hurriedly filling out blank absentee ballots in a locked room.

Affidavit filed by Broward Election’s employee in support of Caldwell lawsuit provides eye witness account of Elections staff filling in blank ballots. When this was reported the employee was fired and told not to come back. #sayfie

— Jeff Kottkamp (@JeffKottkamp) November 10, 2018

The Florida Department of Elections has assured voters that election monitors have seen “no evidence of criminal activity” in Broward County polling places this year. However, reassurances from election officials aren’t likely to placate Republican candidates across the state who have watched their once-promising margins of victory shrink to less than .5 percent, automatically triggering recounts in several key races.

Gov. Rick Scott, who maintains a slight lead over his opponent in a race for U.S. Senate against incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson, has several reasons to doubt the legitimacy of Broward County’s recount results. After Republican lawyers convinced Snipes to share a stack of provisional ballots to the Broward County canvassing board for inspection, investigators discovered that there were more than a dozen rejected ballots mixed in with 200 valid ones.

Poor ballot design problems

In addition, pollsters are blaming “poor ballot design” on the extreme “undervoting” that occurred in the Scott-Nelson Senate race in Broward County. Far fewer people here voted for a candidate in this race than the statewide average, leading analysts to guess that voters skipped it because the option appeared in an unusual spot on their ballots.

To make matters worse, Snipes has so far refused to update the campaigns or explain how long her office plans to take to complete a machine recount.

“We want before we even think about these next phases, to get a straight answer,” Caldwell said in an interview after his opponent suddenly had more votes than him. “Where did these nearly 100,000 ballots come from, when were they cast and why were they not counted yet?” Scott has been equally frustrated.

“Every Floridian should be concerned there may be rampant fraud happening in Palm Beach and Broward counties,” Scott said. “I will not sit idly by while unethical liberals try to steal this election from the people of Florida.”

Broward blunders

Besides the numerous problems with this election, and Smith’s 2016 testimony, Broward County’s election board has made so many mistakes in the past that its offices are known as a “black hole for ballots,” and election officials have been called “the Keystone Kops of elections.” The infamous “hanging chads,” or partially punched paper ballots from the Bush-Gore presidential race, came out of Broward County.

In fact, more than 45 lawsuits involving the county have been heard in state and federal courts resulting from problems with the election office. In 2003, more mail-in ballots were returned to voters as undeliverable than were actually cast, and in 2004 — Snipes first year as supervisor — U.S. postal workers were accused of losing 58,000 absentee ballots, before the county elections office revised that number to 6,000.

“I feel like I live in a Third World country,” one local voter complained in 2004 after learning that Snipes mailed 2,400 absentee ballots too late to be counted.

The blunders continued all the way up to the midterms elections. However, if what Smith says is true about ballot stuffing from the supervisor’s office, this might explain the 11th-hour surge among Democratic voters that triggered at least three recounts across the state.