Broward County Election Supervisor's History Is Mind-Bogglingly Bad. Fire Her Now.
Nearly one week out from the midterm elections, the overwhelming majority of the thousands of federal, state and local elections that took place on Tuesday have been tabulated and a winner declared, with a mere handful of close races and recounts scattered across the country that remain yet to be determined.
Two of those close races that have gone to a recount are the governor and Senate races in Florida, where Republican candidates Rep. Ron DeSantis and Gov. Rick Scott appeared to win those respective offices on Election Day, only to see their leads shrink dramatically in the days following the closing of polls.
The close results triggered automatic recounts by state law once the margin had closed to within a half percentage point.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with a recount, these particular recounts have sparked suspicion in many, given that they appear to have stemmed from the questionable actions — not to mention inaction — of the Broward County Elections Office and Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes.
Snipes failed to make mandatory reports to the state on the night of the election about the total number of ballots received. Her office has since “found” tens of thousands of additional ballots to process in the days after the election was held.
Questions have since been raised as to whether Snipes is subversively attempting to change the outcome of the elections through fraudulent measures or if she is simply too incompetent to manage such a crucial office in Florida’s second-most-populoous county.
Regardless, she and her office have now been hit with lawsuits designed to determine which is the case.
The editorial board of National Review on Sunday published a scathing piece that called for the firing of Snipes as the supervisor of elections in the county, as she quite obviously “does not deserve to be within a thousand miles of any election office anywhere in these United States.”
That assertion was based on Snipes’ rather colorful history in that supervisory position, which she has held since she was appointed to the office in 2003 by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, ironically to replace a woman named Miriam Oliphant who was suspended and removed from office for “grave neglect, mismanagement and incompetence.”
How bad is Snipes at her job? Just in this election alone, she has already been found by a court to have violated state election and public records laws, as well as the state constitution, with regard to her failure to report the total number of absentee and early-vote ballots her office had received by the end of voting on Tuesday.
Those results, which were supposed to have been submitted 30 minutes after polls closed, but still have yet to be disclosed — almost a week later.
Meanwhile, bags and boxes of ballots — some sent by mail, others cast as early-votes or provisionally accepted — continue to be “found” randomly around the county and added into the mix, where they seem to skew the running vote totals in favor of the Democrat candidates for governor and Senate, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum and incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson, respectively.
On top of that, Snipes was caught red-handed mixing in nearly two dozen rejected provisional ballots with a batch of nearly 200 approved provisional ballots waiting to be counted, rendering that entire batch — and other previous batches, by extension — suspect.
Sadly, that incident received a collective shrug from the liberal media.
But Snipes’ suspicious behavior has not been confined solely to this current election, as she actually has quite a history of either gross incompetence or flat-out fraud in previous election cycles. In fact, Snipes had been reprimanded by the courts twice already this year for questionable activities in this year’s and 2016’s primary elections.
In May, Snipes was found to have illegally destroyed ballots from the 2016 Democratic primary election — in which incumbent Democrat Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz had faced a stiff challenge from the left — that she had been ordered to keep safe.
Snipes was reprimanded by the courts again in August after it was found she had been illegally and secretly opening mail-in ballots, without proper bipartisan oversight, during this year’s primary elections.
Furthermore, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that Snipes had left a medical marijuana amendment off ballots in the 2016 election, and had actually begun to post final election results online in the 2016 primary elections before all polls in the county were even closed.
On top of that, more than 1,000 uncounted ballots were discovered a week after the 2012 election, and some 58,000 absentee ballots were never sent out to voters ahead of the 2004 election, which caused a scramble among election officials to rectify the situation and not disenfranchise those voters of their voice.
The way our constitutional Republic practices democracy rests upon the general population having faith that election officials will act in a nonpartisan and transparent fashion as they oversee the casting of ballots and tabulate those ballots once polls have closed. A loss of faith in election officials will only serve to undermine the general population’s faith altogether that our elections are being conducted on the up-and-up
At best, Brenda Snipes is incompetent. At worst, she is wholly corrupt. Either way, it is time for her to resign or be removed from office, as it has become blatantly obvious to most that she is incapable of overseeing a fair and transparent election process in Broward County, and her actions will only lead to more people questioning reported election results that seem fishy … a blow to the precious “democracy” that liberals often cry about and accuse Republicans of destroying.
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