South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Snipes reveals she’s trying to find ballots
Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes, left, said Saturday the 2,040 missing ballots haven’t disappeared, and repeatedly said the ballots are “in the building.” Meanwhile, Andrew Gillum conceded in the governor’s race.
Broward County’s ballot recount hit yet another snag Saturday with 2,040 ballots lost or misplaced.
The county’s eternally beleaguered Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes said they were either misplaced, misfiled or mixed in with another stack.
One thing she said she was sure of was that the ballots were still in the building.
“The ballots are in this building. There would be nowhere else for them to be,” Snipes said. “The ballots are in the building. The ballots are in the building.”
Snipes has been in the crosshairs of national controversy since Election Day.
With a noon Sunday deadline looming, the threeperson Canvassing Board was nonplussed and uncertain what to do.
“We are concerned with the ramifications of failing to complete this task,” said Broward County Judge Betsy Benson, a member of the board. “But we don’t want to disenfranchise 714,849 voters at the expense of 2,000 voters.”
Snipes told the elections Canvassing Board and lawyers representing the Democratic and Republican parties that an employee likely misplaced the ballots.
“I’m not blaming anyone, but many of our team members were not as well trained as some others,” she said.
The issue is that the county’s vote tally first reported to the state on Nov. 10 had a bigger total than the machine recount produced when it was completed Thursday.
That’s because the ostensibly lost ballots likely didn’t get tabulated during the recount, Snipes said.
Snipes said that elections office staff and contractors believe that the initial vote totals — with higher number of votes cast — from the first report to the state are accurate and the second set of number’s aren’t accurate.
The big question was what to do next. When final results are sent to the state on Sunday, she wants to base those numbers on the original returns from Nov. 10 — possibly adjusted for additional votes uncovered in manual recounts of over votes and under votes conducted on Friday and Saturday.
Shortly after 8 p.m., a recess was called. The board will return at 8 a.m. to approve a final to send to the state.
The issue came up when Larry Davis, a Democratic attorney who is representing agriculture commissioner candidate Nikki Fried, said he was concerned that fewer votes were reported to the state after the machine recount of ballots than were reported when initial results were sent to the state.
All candidates in key statewide races have lost votes, because of the decrease. But, because it’s happening in Broward, where most voters are Democrats, Davis said his party’s candidates are most affected.
“Candidates for statewide and other offices are losing votes,” Davis said.
His client, Fried, is locked in an exceedingly tight race with Republican Matt Caldwell for agriculture commissioner.
Davis pressed the elections supervisor — “Dr. Snipes, with all due respect to you and your office” — to explain what happened. “The ballots being in the building doesn’t get them counted,” he said.
He said some action needs to be taken so that the voters who cast those ballots aren’t disenfranchised. He said time is of the essence because final vote totals for the manual recount of ballots in the Fried-Caldwell need to be filed with the state by noon Sunday.
“We have only 24 hours to get this done,” Davis said at about noon.
The reason for Davis’s concern is clear. From the first vote counting results reported to the state Nov. 10 and the machine recount reported to the state on Thursday, Fried’s vote total went down 1,341 votes in Broward. Caldwell’s vote total decreased 616.
Statewide, Fried led Caldwell by just 5,307 votes — out of more than 8 million cast — after the machine recounts were completed in most counties on Thursday- were reportedly beginning the “logic and accuracy” testing of equipment in the House race recount.
About an hour after teams of vote counters in Broward began their work, it came to an abrupt — but brief — halt. Saturday’s business in Broward was the ultra-tight race for agriculture commissioner between Democrat Nikki Fried and Republican Matt Caldwell.
Attorneys for both the Democratic and Republican parties said they were concerned that some teams got envelopes of votes they shouldn’t be counting: undervotes and overvotes in the Bill Nelson-Rick Scott race for U.S. Senate, a contest Broward manually recounted on Friday.
Because the votes weren’t clear in the Senate race, but were clear in the agriculture commissioner race, that suggested that the teams might have gotten some that needed examination for the Senate race, but not the agriculture commissioner race. If those ballots had already been counted in the agriculture commissioner race, recounting them again could presumably have resulted in double counting some votes.
Democratic and Republican attorneys complained. "We would move that today’s hand recount be ceased and a new resorting of all the ballots occur,” Republican attorney Republican attorney Joseph Goldstein told the elections Canvassing Board. It appeared as if there was only a small number of affected ballots, perhaps 10 to 20, and the attorneys didn’t pursue it further.
The Canvassing Board ordered collection of all the envelopes marked for the U.S. Senate race, had them sent to a secure room away from the recount area, and resumed the recounting.