Tim Canova, who overwhelmingly lost his latest attempt to unseat Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, wants a judge to throw out the results of the November election. He wants a do-over — with all the ballots counted by hand.
In a lawsuit filed in Leon County Circuit Court, calling Wasserman Schultz the “reported winner,” Canova asserts that misconduct by former Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes “require[s] that the election be set aside,” arguing that “her actions create more than reasonable doubt that the certified results do not express the will of the voters.”
Canova, who ran as a no party affiliation/independent candidate, received 13,697 votes — slightly less than 5 percent — in the Nov. 6 election. Democrat Wasserman Schultz received 161,611 votes, which works out to 58.5 percent.
The latest version of Canova’s complaint, filed Wednesday, focuses its critique on Snipes and the way the election was conducted in Broward. The district includes parts of two counties, and Canova received a higher percentage of the vote (5.1 percent) in the Broward part of the district than in the Miami-Dade part of the district (3.4 percent).
Canova faces an exceedingly high bar in seeking to set aside the results and get a new election.
“It’s really, really tough,” said Mark Herron, a Tallahassee lawyer who is an expert on election law. Herron commented generally, not on the merits of Canova’s case. The most recent high-profile case was a judge’s order overturning the 1997 Miami mayoral election after extensive absentee ballot fraud.
Among Canova’s allegations:
Snipes’ office didn’t report the results for each voting precinct by voting method — Election Day voting, early voting, mail voting — in a timely manner. Canova’s suit describes votes that weren’t immediately identified as “nearly 98,000 votes from nowhere.” Canova said they “may have been votes transferred illegally from another candidate or candidates.” The lawsuit offers no evidence to support that theory. The results are reported the same way in other counties — and the way state rules require.
State regulations tell elections supervisors to break down results by candidate and ballot type — except that when one of the categories is fewer than 10 votes “the supervisor shall report zero votes in all subtotals.” The rule ensures individual votes are kept secret.
The ballot scanners used at polling places “are inherently defective as to the chain of custody for the electronic votes.” Canova asserted that the modems in the machines “render them highly susceptible to outside hacking and inside software manipulation.”
Ballots on election night were, in at least some cases, accompanied by just one person, which allowed individuals “the improper opportunity to do anything they want with the ballots.”
Snipes posed for a picture with Wasserman Schultz on Oct. 27, showing “an arrogant disregard to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest in the supervision of the 2018 election.”
A significant number of undervotes, where people voted in other races, “may mean that legitimate votes have either not been counted or have been discarded.”
Congressional races in Broward were placed in the lower left corner of the ballot, below the instructions, a placement that apparently caused massive under voting in the U.S. Senate race, contributing to incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson’s defeat. During the recount in the Senate race, there wasn’t evidence of votes not counted or discarded. The lawsuit asserts that the location of the race on the ballot “is unlikely to be the sole reason for the high undervote.”
Snipes’ overall handling of the 2018 election, including missed deadlines, a 2,040-ballot discrepancy during recounting and the confusing ballot design, generated massive criticism. In mid-November, Snipes said she would resign in January. On Nov. 30, Gov. Rick Scott suspended and replaced Snipes, citing “misfeasance, incompetence and neglect of duty.”
Much of Canova’s complaint in the current case repeats his dispute with Snipes over the 2016 Democratic congressional primary, which Canova lost to Wasserman Schultz.
A Broward circuit court judge ruled in May that Snipes’ office broke federal and state law by destroying ballots too soon after the August 2016 primary. Snipes signed the ballot destruction order a year after the primary; the law requires preservation of the ballots for 22 months.
The ballots were destroyed even though a separate Canova lawsuit seeking access to the ballots was pending.
Canova, who lives in Hollywood, is a professor of law and public finance at Nova Southeastern University. Wasserman Schultz, a Weston resident, is serving her seventh term in Congress. Two other candidates were on the ballot in November: Republican Joe Kaufman, who won 36 percent of the vote, and no party affiliation candidate Don Endriss, who received 0.6 percent.
The state Elections Canvassing Commission, a defendant in the Canova suit, determines who is elected in presidential, state office and congressional contests. The state Division of Elections, part of the Secretary of State’s Office, operates as the staff for the commission. Sarah Revell, spokeswoman for the agency, said by email she couldn’t comment on pending litigation.
Wasserman Schultz’s spokesman declined to comment.
READ First Amended Complaint To Contest Election- use lower left arrow to scroll down
Misconduct by Brenda Snipes is sufficient to place in doubt the result of the 2018 election
Tim Canova, independent candidate in Florida’s 23rd Congressional District, has filed a complaint in Florida Circuit Court to invalidate the results of the 2018 general election and declare that a “new election shall proceed with hand-marked paper ballots that are counted by hand in public and reported immediately and publicly at the local precinct level.” Within days, Canova supplemented the filing with a more detailed amended complaint.
The court filing to the Florida Circuit Court comes barely a year since Snipes unlawfully destroyed hundreds of boxes of all paper ballots cast in Broward County in the 2016 Democratic primary for Florida’s 23rd Congressional district between Canova and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
In the details of Canova’s court filing, Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes “engaged in misconduct that was sufficient to change or place in doubt the results of the 2018 election.” Canova cites Snipes, Dozel Spencer, the SOE Director of Voting Equipment, and other deputy supervisors “violated their oaths to faithfully perform their duties, engaged in repeated misconduct and violations of state and federal laws, including criminal statutes.”
Section 102.168(3) of the Florida Statutes provides that an election may be set aside for “misconduct, fraud, or corruption on the part of any election official or any member of the canvassing board sufficient to change or place in doubt the result of the election.” The misconduct by Snipes was sufficient to place in doubt the result of this election.
Among the failures cited in Canova’s challenge:
Snipes failed to safeguard the chain of custodyof the paper ballots cast in Broward County for this election, and the scope of this issue is sufficient to change or place in doubt the results of this election as now certified.
The certification of the purported 2018 election results is based on inadequate and incomplete information, and it is therefore an invalid certification of those results. More specifically, approximately 98,000 votes are reported by Snipes to have been cast for Schultz without any indication as to how and when those votes were cast. To date, Snipes still has not provided this information about the “98,000 votes from nowhere.”
The electronic voting machines used for this election are inherently defective as to the chain of custody for the electronic votes cast in this election.
READ First Amended Complaint To Contest Election- use lower left arrow to scroll down
Since Election Day, the eyes of the nation have been on Broward County. While all other counties in Florida completed their counting of ballots, Broward continued finding new ballots to be counted, nearly swinging the election results for U.S. Senate and Florida Governor from Republicans to Democrats. Now there’s a state-wide machine recount, and the likelihood of lawsuits and possible hand recounts.
It’s been more than a year since we discovered that Brenda Snipes, the Broward Supervisor of Elections, illegally destroyed all the ballots cast in our 2016 primary against Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The news media refused to cover the story. If not for this double-trainwreck that landed in Broward, with both Governor and Senate races hanging in the balance, the media blackout would have continued. Instead, because of her role in the middle of the contested races for Governor and Senator, the mainstream media is finally asking questions about Snipes.
I warned for months that the failure to remove Snipes and her cronies from office would undermine public trust and result in continuing election irregularities, frauds, and illegal conduct. Since Election Day, I have heard from countless Broward residents from across the political spectrum expressing the same view, that they have lost faith and confidence in Broward election results, from non-partisan city commission and judicial elections to primaries and Congressional elections. Many ran for office as outsiders fighting for clean government, and now are horrified to see the level of corruption in our elections.
Two years ago, I first sought to inspect the ballots cast in our 2016 primary in an effort to verify the vote. Instead, we discovered that Snipes and one of her directors, Dozel Spencer, conspired to obstruct justice and tamper with evidence. This is not a theory, but an actual conspiracy that was established by a mountain of evidence discovered in our public records lawsuit against Snipes. In sworn videotaped depositions, Snipes and Spencer admitted to the ballot destruction.
The Florida Circuit Court then granted us summary judgment in a 10-page order finding that Snipes obstructed justice, lied to the court, illegally tampered with evidence, and violated numerous state and federal criminal statutes, some punishable as felonies.
I reached out to Florida Governor Rick Scott months ago, as well as Democratic and Republican party officials, state and federal law enforcement agencies, and every member of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. None responded, no one saw fit to investigate, and Republican Rick Scott failed to remove Snipes from office, an abdication of his responsibility as Governor to uphold the rule of law and protect us from official corruption.
The journalist Chris Hedges has said that the corruption today is so bad that they don’t even try to hide it. Barely a week before the recent election, Snipes campaigned openly with Wasserman Schultz. And why not, she had already destroyed ballots with impunity. I warned for months that if her crimes went unpunished, Snipes would have every incentive to engage in future illegal conduct and rig another election against us. The burden should not be on campaigns like ours to prove fraud when someone with Snipes’ record is left in charge of elections.
Snipes and her top staff should have been prosecuted months ago. Allowing someone with her record of lawlessness to continue supervising the recent primary and general election taints all those results by creating “incurable uncertainties” about the election outcomes. That’s why a growing number of Broward residents and former candidates are now arguing that recent election results from the primary and general elections should be invalidated, and that the courts should order new elections with appropriate safeguards – namely, hand-marked paper ballots that are counted by hand in public.
Our campaign has also uncovered other disturbing irregularities in the recent election. One campaign volunteer smelled a rat on Election night, and took video on her smart phone of a line of private vehicles driving up and transferring the blue satchels containing paper ballots to a rented truck.
Outside the Plantation, Florida voting site on Election night 2018.
The ballots should have been in the possession of two people at all times. They were not. In addition, the ballots should have been transferred only to a sheriff’s deputy who should have signed a receipt for the ballots. None of this happened, which destroys the “chain-of-custody” of the ballots and casts doubt on any potential paper ballot recount.
Like many other candidates who have lost under highly suspicious circumstances, we are still assessing our options moving forward. One thing is certain, whatever happens to our campaign, we will continue calling for Snipes and her staff to be removed from office and prosecuted for their crimes. The criminal justice system must be used to clean up the swamp in the Broward elections office.
Sadly, what has been happening here in Broward County, with election officials breaking the law with impunity, could happen almost anywhere in the country. Our fight is your fight, and we will keep on fighting.
By Lulu Friesdat | November 13, 2018 | Link to TruthOut report
Counties across Florida are currently under intense pressure and scrutiny as they race to complete the unprecedented task of three simultaneous statewide recounts. According to a schedule provided to Truthout by the Florida Fair Elections Coalition (FFEC), the deadline for finishing machine recounts and submitting those second unofficial results is Thursday, November 15, at 3 pm. Races that are close enough to require what is being described as a “manual” recount — where a limited number of ballots are counted by hand — must submit official returns Friday, November 16, by noon. Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher has already stated that her county will be unable to meet the deadline, calling it “impossible.” The statewide races where recounts are required are for governor, agricultural commissioner and Senate, where current Gov. Rick Scott maintains a razor-thin lead of 12,562 votes in his attempt to take a Senate seat away from his rival Democrat incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson. That lead is now less than the mysterious 25,000 undervote that was reported previously in the race.
According to The New York Times, if any county cannot complete the recount by the deadline, then Saturday’s results will stand in that county. Another county that is likely to find the recounts challenging is Broward County, a behemoth Democratic stronghold with over 700,000 total ballots cast. The supervisor of elections there, Brenda Snipes, received a summary judgment against her in May 2018 for illegally destroying ballots in the 2016 Democratic congressional primary race between incumbent Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova, a professor of law and public finance at Nova Southeastern University.
Counties across Florida are currently under intense pressure and scrutiny as they race to complete the unprecedented task of three simultaneous statewide recounts. According to a schedule provided to Truthout by the Florida Fair Elections Coalition (FFEC), the deadline for finishing machine recounts and submitting those second unofficial results is Thursday, November 15, at 3 pm. Races that are close enough to require what is being described as a “manual” recount — where a limited number of ballots are counted by hand — must submit official returns Friday, November 16, by noon. Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher has already stated that her county will be unable to meet the deadline, calling it “impossible.” The statewide races where recounts are required are for governor, agricultural commissioner and Senate, where current Gov. Rick Scott maintains a razor-thin lead of 12,562 votes in his attempt to take a Senate seat away from his rival Democrat incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson. That lead is now less than the mysterious 25,000 undervote that was reported previously in the race.
According to The New York Times, if any county cannot complete the recount by the deadline, then Saturday’s results will stand in that county. Another county that is likely to find the recounts challenging is Broward County, a behemoth Democratic stronghold with over 700,000 total ballots cast. The supervisor of elections there, Brenda Snipes, received a summary judgment against her in May 2018 for illegally destroying ballots in the 2016 Democratic congressional primary race between incumbent Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova, a professor of law and public finance at Nova Southeastern University.
Uncompromised, uncompromising news
The destruction of those ballots has received considerable attention lately. Governor Scott cited it in his emotionally charged press conference Thursday as one reason for filing a lawsuit against the county. The court action — which he won — demanded an emergency hearing and the right to inspect all of the county’s ballots. On Friday, Florida Congressman and Trump bullhorn Matt Gaetz was yelling at the top of his lungs, “Remember, Brenda Snipes destroyed ballots in 2016! Who the hell destroys ballots?” as protesters chanted, “Snipes is corrupt!” outside the Broward County Supervisor of Elections Office. President Trump lost no time jumping into the fray, tweeting that same day about the “Broward Effect” and asking why they never find Republican votes.
But it’s not just Republicans who are fed up with Snipes’s performance as the Broward County supervisor of elections. Kitty Garber, the research director and co-founder of the nonpartisan FFEC expressed similar concerns, saying Snipes “has presided over a continuous sequence of election disasters.”
Rick Scott, as governor, was the one person who could have removed Snipes from office following the judgment against her. Previous governors have removed elected officials from office when they were found engaging in misconduct, and Garber wonders why the governor didn’t do something about Snipes when he had the opportunity. She offered a different perspective on his motivation.
“It is Rick Scott’s administration that has ignored the calls for Snipes to be removed or reprimanded for her behavior. Why is that? Because her behavior has disproportionately harmed Democratic candidates,” Garber told Truthout in an email. “When absentee ballots go missing in largely Democratic Broward County, you can be sure that most of them belong to Democratic voters.”
Canova, who lost his race in the election where Snipes destroyed the ballots, condemned the entire process as undemocratic. He posted a video tweet, saying, “I know at the heart of your anger is what I felt after no one stepped up to investigate Brenda Snipes — it’s losing confidence we have in democracy.”
Programmable Results
After his 2016 encounter with Brenda Snipes and the Broward County Supervisor of Elections office, Canova’s frustration was deep enough to propel him to leave the Democratic Party, although not enough to give up politics. He is running for Congress again in the 23rd District, this time as an Independent. Wasserman Schultz is again his main rival, but it is a four-way race that also includes Republican Joe Kaufman and Independent Don Endriss. Wasserman Schultz has already declared victory, with current results showing her at close to 59 percent. But Canova has refused to concede. His mantra has been that in Florida, both parties are locked in a culture of corporate corruption. Although his second campaign did not generate the millions in small donations that his first run did, it sparked a large influx of motivated, new voters and he decried the unofficial results that show him receiving 5.1 percent of the vote. In an email to a group of election security advocates and experts, he said, “After the bullshit results were announced…. What does that even mean … when insiders can program any result they want?”
Bennie Smith, a computer programmer who does demographic analysis for candidates in Memphis, Tennessee, said that the surging turnout among young and first-time voters in the early voting data he reviewed seemed to support Canova’s logic. He suggested that Canova might want to try collecting affidavits from voters, and see if there are more voters who say they voted for him in a given precinct than were reported.
Can election results be programmed by malware to report a different result than what the voters intended? Security experts have been warning for years that this was possible. In a 2017 congressional briefing, Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, said, “Hacking a national election in the United States would be, well, shockingly easy.” At the same congressional briefing, James Scott, a senior fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, shared that his organization had been hired to research what techniques would most likely be used in such a scenario. He described the method of choice as one where candidates’ votes are redistributed unequally. The votes of one candidate are assigned a fraction of their actual value, while another candidate receives a larger allocation. “The payload that most of these guys are interested in would be a tabulation manipulation feature using fractionalization and decimalization which weighs the vote,” James Scott said. “It gives every vote a certain weight. And … that way, it looks completely legitimate.”
Smith was featured in a Bloomberg Businessweek report on election irregularities in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. He is an underground celebrity in the election security community for having reverse-engineered a program that actually does what James Scott is describing.
In a phone interview with Truthout, he said a program like this “could happen at the machine to each single vote,” but emphasized that it would be more efficient to run the program on the central tabulation computer. He described it as a type of “bonus” option that the software is designed to accept but that only a few people might have access to, somewhat like upgrading from a free to a paid application that has extra features. “You build a system and you build a standalone component,” he said, adding that the “component is only in the hands of a select few people.”
Garber pointed out that the software management systems that Broward and many other Florida counties use are provided by VR Systems, a company that is widely believed to have been hacked in 2017, although the company has denied it.
A Vast Array of Irregularities in the 2018 Broward County Results
Truthout did a preliminary analysis of the data that is currently available in the November 6 general election in Broward County. We downloaded the data throughout the counting process to see how it was changing. We also compared some of the Broward County data to other counties. We found a vast array of irregularities in the Broward County results.
Our research is in the early stages. During the time we were collecting and analyzing data, the counties’ results were all still updating, so these figures are approximate and fluid. Where possible, we have gone back and tried to update with final data, but in light of the undergoing recount, we are releasing preliminary assessments as rapidly as possible.
Here are examples of irregularities and the data packets that we are releasing to illustrate them.
1) Time-stamped video of the completely reported results from the Broward County Supervisor of Elections website in the Senate race between Nelson and Scott, the governor’s race between Gillum and DeSantis and the 23rd Congressional District race show votes for candidates in precinct after precinct with totals and percentages listed, but no indication of where and how those votes were cast.
The categories of Election Day, Vote By Mail, Early Voting, Write-In and Provisional Votes are all frequently completely blank. Leaving all of these categories vacant would allow the totals for any candidate to be reallocated with ease. We found this pattern throughout the Broward County results, including the agricultural commissioner race, which is also undergoing a recount, and the race for attorney general.
Until the county updates the data, this can be confirmed by going to the Broward County Supervisor of Elections website. Click on “Election Information” on the left side of the page to reveal a dropdown menu. Select “Election Results,” and then “November 6, 2018 General Election.” On the tab, select “Precinct Results.” Set the “View Type” as “Detailed” and select the race you would like to view.
Election officials we consulted said that most state laws do not require jurisdictions to include information about the voting method, and that there are a lot of innocent explanations for that. But Douglas Jones, a professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, said that Broward County’s history “sets out a strong reason for being highly suspicious.” Other counties in Florida are reporting votes by category.
2) Screenshots showing the same issue listed above. A screenshot of our data shows that in precincts M006, M008, M010 and M011, Canova received 67 votes, but there is no indication of how. This is just one example of a problem that occurs throughout the results.
In the 23rd Congressional District race, Tim Canova’s totals are missing vote by category information in many precincts. Many totals do not correspond to the given explanation that a dash represents “between 1 and 9 votes.” BENNIE SMITH
3) Spreadsheets of data downloaded from the Broward County Supervisor of Elections’ website show that data is being removed, not added. When we first downloaded the results of the 23rd Congressional District on November 8, there was more information in the various categories, such as Election Day, Vote By Mail and Early Voting. When we downloaded the information again on November 11, many more of the categories had become blank. This seems odd, since in general, counties are adding more information, or updating totals as they count the votes, not removing already reported results.
In the 23rd Congressional District race, Broward County provided information about votes by category on November 8 in many precincts.
By November 11, Broward County had removed vote by category information in many precincts.
4) A spreadsheet showing that Wasserman Schultz received close to 100,000 votes in precincts with no indication how or when those votes were cast.
Wasserman Schultz received 97,874 votes in precincts where vote by category information is missing. Her total votes in the race were reported by the county to be 148,682.
5) There appears to be an unusually high number of undervotes in the race for Congress in the 23rd District in Broward County — the race between Canova and Wasserman Schultz. An undervote is a ballot where a voter has signed in, and cast a ballot, but for some reason not voted in a given race.
A high undervote rate can be concerning, because it may mean that legitimate votes have either not been counted or have been discarded.
Truthout estimates the undervotes in the 23rd Congressional District race at around 11,000, or 4.4 percent, a figure that is approximately twice as much as the undervotes in any other congressional district race. A precinct by precinct analysis of the undervotes in the 23rd District race shows that in particular, there are four precincts (V012, V030, V010 and M008) with undervotes of between 63 and 90 percent.
The 23rd District race between Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova has an undervote rate of 4.4 percent, more than twice that of any other congressional district in the state. High undervote rates can sometimes indicate that valid votes have not been counted. Over 11,000 voters appear not to have cast a vote in this race for Congress.
Undervotes in the Broward County 23rd District congressional race are challenging to calculate because Broward County includes four congressional districts, one of which (the 24th) did not have a race on the ballot. There are also precincts that are split between two districts. At first glance, it might appear that there are 70,000 undervotes in the district, but after taking into account those factors, we found an undervote rate that was still twice as high as any other district in the state. Over 10,000 voters appear not to have cast a vote in this race.
Other districts show a range in the number of voters who did not participate in their congressional races, from very small counties like Lafayette, where 67 voters out of 2,830 (2.3 percent) did not choose to cast a ballot for Congress, to larger counties like Volusia, where the number was close to 5,000 out of around 230,000 (2.2 percent). On average, the other Florida congressional districts have an undervote rate of 1.69 percent, based on the totals being reported at the time the data was collected. All of these numbers were fluctuating somewhat as the counties were finishing their preliminary count. But no other district that we examined approached the high percent of voters who appear not to have cast a vote in the Wasserman Schultz/Canova race.
We calculated the undervote for the congressional race by comparing that race to voters who voted in the governor’s race, because a total number of votes by precinct was unavailable at that time.
Poor Ballot Design Is Offered as One Explanation
One possibility offered to explain the large number of voters not participating in the Senate and congressional races was an unfortunate ballot design in Broward that had both races in the lower left hand corner, even though these are considered top-of-ticket races.
A poor ballot design has been suggested as one reason for the high undervote rate in the Florida congressional and Senate races. FLORIDA FAIR ELECTIONS COALITION
“I believe that the excessive residual votes in the Senate and congressional races are due largely to really terrible ballot design,” Garber said. She added that the Florida Fair Elections Coalition had put out recommendations in 2008, suggesting, among other things, that counties get design experts to help them with layout and conduct usability tests before the election. But she says these recommendations were ignored.
Daniel H. Wolf, the founder and CEO of Democracy Counts, the group that created a same-day election audit system, was skeptical that such a large block of voters not casting their vote could be due to ballot design. Wolf, a Harvard-educated attorney and a former statistics professor, said, “You just don’t see chunks of the population behaving like that…. This is not a trivial number.”
Missing Poll Tapes
Wolf’s opinion may have been influenced by his experience in the field in the 23rd District. His organization designed a citizens’ poll of the congressional race that centered around taking photos of poll tapes that are required by Florida law to be posted outside of every polling station at the close of polls. However, volunteers were stunned to find one polling location after another where there were either no poll tapes posted, or the poll tapes that were posted were missing the 23rd congressional race – the one between Canova and Wasserman Schultz.
Victoria Olson, a resident of Fort Lauderdale who was participating in the citizen audit through Democracy Counts, turned in data showing that of nine precincts she visited, seven poll tapes did not show results for that race. She said that she and other volunteers had a hard time finding any precincts that had posted the tapes, something she herself had posted when she worked the polls.
Susan Pynchon, the founder and executive director of the Florida Fair Elections Coalition, confirmed the existence of the statute requiring the tapes to be posted and said, “It would seem to be a clear violation if they did not post the results at each polling place.”
Wolf thinks the discrepancies may have affected other candidates in the race besides Canova. He said volunteers for Republican Joe Kaufman found that Kaufman had a strong lead on one of the tapes, but that the unofficial results from the county showed Wasserman Schultz winning in that precinct. “Joined together with all of the other data we’re producing, it begins to take on patterns and gets more persuasive,” Wolf said.
Election Experts Respond to the Data
Election experts who reviewed the data package were concerned and incredulous, with even longtime veterans of recounts and audits saying they had never seen anything like it.
Karen McKim, a coordinator at Wisconsin Election Integrity, had just finished reviewing the Dane County election audit for her state when we spoke with her by phone. She started by saying, “Looks like a royal mess!” She has conducted and coordinated six citizen audits in Dane County, Wisconsin, and has observed another half dozen.
McKim was stunned on her first viewing of the high undervote rates in precincts V012, V030, V010 and M008. She insisted, “There’s no reason the undervote rate should vary this widely across the county,” reasoning that the ballot design could explain the undervote if it was consistent across all precincts, but could in no way account for such large variation between precincts. “All those precincts were working off the same ballot design. The ballot design can’t explain that.”
Regarding the breakdown by category in the 23rd District that went missing in their later reports, she said, “It concerns me any time data disappears…. There’s some reason election officials decided to make the data disappear. And we need to understand that to know what’s going on. It’s not good.”
Discussing possible explanations, she said, “On the face of it — that’s an error.” But she acknowledged that fraud could also be designed to look like an error. “If you want to defraud someone, you make it look like a mistake.”
Election officials we consulted said that most state laws do not require jurisdictions to include information about voting method, and that there are a lot of innocent explanations for that. But Douglas Jones, a professor of computer science at the University of Iowa who served on the Election Assistance Commission’s Technical Guidelines Development Committee for four years, said via email that Broward County’s history “sets out a strong reason for being highly suspicious.”
Virginia Martin is the Democratic Election Commissioner in Columbia County, New York, where she oversees a modified hand-count audit of all or most of their ballots for every election. Martin pointed out in an email that the totals provided by Broward County do not correspond to the explanation: “A dash is said to represent between 1 and 9 votes, which it clearly does not because the totals far exceed four categories at nine votes each.” She said presenting the results this way, “strikes me as suspect.”
Regarding the undervote rate of 4.4 percent in the race between Canova and Wasserman Schultz, she said it seemed “Very odd,” and offered that the undervote rate in her congressional district is 1.3 percent.
Pynchon, the executive director of the FFEC, has reviewed dozens of elections, and spent a year investigating one set of anomalies in Sarasota, Florida. She stressed that these irregularities were not the ordinary type of small inconsistencies that frequently have to get sorted out after an election.
Security Experts Say Machine Recounts Cannot Resolve These Questions
In addition to the statewide recounts, some counties are recounting local races as well. Volusia County discovered a 240-vote discrepancy Monday night “between votes cast in the election and those tabulated in the recount,” according to the West Volusia Beacon.
Pynchon clarified that what is happening in the current Florida recount — even in the instances where it is being called a “manual count” — is not a full hand count of the votes. “They never look at all the ballots by hand.” Ballots are first fed through machines for the “machine” recount. If after the machine recount the margin of victory is within 0.25 percent, then the undervotes and overvotes are counted by hand — but only if there are enough of them to change the outcome of the election.
Garber said, “I don’t think the machine recount is very helpful. It’s not likely to get a different result if there’s some problem with the machine or the ballot … I think they should count all the ballots by hand.”
In the 2016 recount in Wisconsin, six security experts filed affidavits that the only way to accurately determine if there is fraud or error in a close contest is to examine the ballots by hand. They said that the process of running the ballots through the same machines that they were run through — or even different machines — is unlikely to discover any type of viral program or machine error in the count. Philip Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, stated in his affidavit, “The amount of error required to alter the outcome can easily be less than the error that an optical scan system makes.”
McKim says that’s exactly what happened in Racine County, Wisconsin, in 2016. “The problem was that the machine was miscounting,” she told Truthout. “It simply couldn’t read a lot of the absentee ballots. It couldn’t read them the first time and it couldn’t read them the second time…. When we came in later and did a hand count, human eyes could easily see the votes, and we found that more than 1,000 Racine County voters had been disenfranchised in the presidential election of 2016.”
Questions About Chain of Custody
Canova also retweeted video alleging provisional ballots were left behind by a truck, and that other ballots were being transported and moved between vehicles with only one person in the car.
Olson told Truthout in a phone interview that she, too, had seen poll workers transporting ballots by themselves. She said the woman she saw doing it acknowledged it was not the correct protocol, but said she was doing it anyway. Pynchon noted that at one time, there was a technical advisory in effect stating that two people should be with the ballots or memory cards of electronic voting machines at all times. Now, however, counties design their own security procedures and then submit them to the state for approval, and she says that the oversight is very lax.
A Labyrinth of Obstruction, Deception and Illegality
I have personal experience with one of the “election disasters” that Brenda Snipes presided over. In November of 2016, I filed the first of three public records requests for election materials related to the initial contest between incumbent Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova in the 23rd District Democratic primary. After the primary in August 2016, I worked with a team of data analysts looking at the results of the race. There were patterns in the vote totals that concerned us. I thought that looking at the actual paper ballots in the race might help clarify whether the results were accurate, and also help determine if there was any validity to our analysis. So, I was eager to see the ballots. I also requested all of the digital ballot images, and other contextual items like poll book logs.
That was my entry into a labyrinth of obstruction, deception and ultimately criminal behavior that Broward County engaged in over the course of 18 months. The saga culminated in Snipes personally signing off on the illegal destruction of the ballots in that race, even as a court case was pending demanding that the ballots be released. Canova joined me in the public records request, and had ample opportunity to experience the county’s lack of transparency and suspicious behavior.
For example, when we requested the digital ballot images, Snipes, her attorney and Broward Registration Clerk Dolly Gibson all sent emails saying that they did not retain digital ballot images. In a December 16, 2016, email, Snipes said, “We do not capture, or use digital ballot images from the DS200.” After a year of wrangling (during which time Canova filed suit against Snipes) the county finally scheduled an inspection of the paper ballots. But on my arrival at the Broward County Board of Elections office, the county’s attorney informed me that no paper ballots were available, and that I would be shown digital ballot images instead. Then during the inspection, they claimed that they had not one but twosets of digital ballot images: one from their voting machines and a second set created by a third-party vendor. Chain of custody documents around these ballots were only partially filled out; and there was never any documentation that could prove that those digital ballot images were identical to the original paper ballots.
We never got to see the actual paper ballots in the race. Negotiations stalled repeatedly because the county refused to allow a video camera or any photographs to be taken at an inspection. The FFEC told us that photographing or videotaping ballot inspections is standard in other counties. Then during court proceedings, the county’s attorney Burnadette Norris-Weeks informed the judge that the ballots had been destroyed, a violation of both state and federal law.
Canova won a summary judgment against Snipes in May 2018, and the county was ordered to pay his legal fees. Circuit Court Judge Raag Singhal said in that ruling that the county’s defenses were “without substance in fact or law.”
A May 2018 summary judgment against Brenda Snipes and the Broward County Supervisor of Elections Office said their defenses for withholding and illegally destroying ballots were “without substance in fact or law.” LULU FRIESDAT
One piece of useful data that I obtained in the course of the public records requests was the county’s record of how many voters had voted in each precinct of the race. Working again with a team of data analysts, I compared the number of voters who voted with the number of cast ballots in every precinct. This is a simple, straightforward analysis to run on any election. Election officials, candidates and observers all know that at the end of a legitimate election, there needs to be an accurate reconciliation of voters to ballots. Every voter who votes needs to correspond to one and only one ballot that is counted. For example, if a voter spoils a ballot and asks for another, that has to be logged, and the spoiled ballot has to be set aside with other unusable ballots, as proof that the voter was not allowed to vote twice. In the results of Canova’s 2016 run against Wasserman Schultz, we found an over 1,000-vote discrepancy between the number of voters and the number of cast ballots. Out of 211 precincts, only 19 had the same number of voters as cast ballots. Election experts I spoke with were stunned, saying the results indicated either gross negligence or fraud.
Election Protection Advocates Descend on the State
In response to this flurry of recounts and lawsuits, election protection advocates are hunkering down in the state. John Brakey, co-founder and director of AUDIT USA, was in Broward County photographing modems in the voting machines, a security vulnerability that could allow hackers to change election results. Chris Sautter — an attorney who has filed (and won some) lawsuits in conjunction with Brakey’s group in Alabama, Virginia and Ohio — have filed a lawsuit against Secretary of State Ken Detzner and over a dozen Florida Supervisor of Elections’ officials in order to require the counties to preserve digital ballot images. Brakey and many other security advocates believe that digital ballot images are a tool that will make it easier for the public and candidates to independently verify vote counts.
Security experts say wireless modems in voting machines make them vulnerable to hackers. JOHN BRAKEY
For Canova, all of this may be too little too late. In a personal text, he communicated that not only would he not run for office again, he wasn’t even sure he would ever vote again, unless a system of hand-marked paper ballots, transparently hand-counted in public, was instituted. “Short of that, I don’t think I could put myself through this again,” he said.
Part of Canova’s challenge has been that, for the most part, Democrats have chosen not to speak out when they suspect election fraud. In a September radio interview, Senator and former presidential candidate John Kerry admitted that his team suspected the 2004 presidential race in Ohio had been manipulated against them, but he said they felt it was better for the country not to contest it. Republicans are showing no such restraint, harmonizing with each other in a collective chorus about fraud and forgery. Until Democrats also help authorities and the public to identify races they consider suspect, they may continue to lose control of the narrative and experience potentially deeper losses at the ballot box.
Bennie Smith provided data analysis for this report.
Corrections note: This article was updated to note that Susan Pynchon is the executive director of the FFEC; that a manual recount only counts undervotes and overvotes; and that there are no Florida laws that address chain of custody – only guidelines.
The Miami Herald reports that Brenda Snipes says she wants to stay in office through the 2020 primaries and election. This is a disgrace. Snipes says she’s accomplished her mission of providing a “credible product” for Broward County. We beg to differ. Snipes should be suspended and removed from office as soon as possible, and her entire operation replaced to root out the corruption obviously swirling around her. There needs to be criminal prosecution of Snipes and her director Dozel Spencer for illegally destroying ballots, obstructing investigations, and tampering with evidence. And that’s just from our 2016 primary against Snipes’ crony and ally Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Wassermann Schultz and Snipes campaigning together in October 2018.
‘It is time to move on’: Brenda Snipes talks leaving elections post in Broward County
By Alex Harris | November 13, 2018 | Link to Miami Herald story
After days of enduring heavy criticism, Broward’s controversial supervisor of elections said Tuesday might not seek another term in office.
Brenda Snipes told reporters “it is time to move on” from the position she has held for 15 years as head of Broward County’s elections. Her current term runs through 2020.
“I think I have served the purpose that I came for, which is to provide a credible election product for Broward,” she said.
The decision isn’t final, she said, because she still has to talk to her family about it.
Snipes’ announcement came after a reporter asked her response to a tweet from former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who appointed Snipes, calling for her removal from office.
“There is no question that Broward County Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes failed to comply with Florida law on multiple counts, undermining Floridians’ confidence in our electoral process,” Bush tweeted.
Snipes called the tweet “his opinion,” and said she has worked tireless since Bush picked her for the position. She has since been elected to the post four times and would be up for reelection in 2020.
If she remains in office until then, she would be supervising the presidential election in 2020, the same one in which her successor would be chosen.
“Many supervisors’ offices have various types of incidents to occur,” she said. “I don’t know why we get a bigger spotlight than some.”
She also responded to a recent baseless tweet from President Donald Trump accusing her office of “finding” votes, without any evidence to prove it.
“Well, I don’t have a treasure trove for going out digging on the beach or somewhere to find any votes ,” she said. “I haven’t had the opportunity to meet the president other than seeing him on TV. And he hasn’t met me.”
