Judges: Too few workers for recount in Broward
The Broward elections office didn't have enough workers to recount votes in the November election, according to a selfevaluation sent to the state.
The report has two parts, one signed by two judges and nowsuspended Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes and the other signed only the by judges.
The version with Snipes’ signature says staffing shortages did not contribute to votecounting delays. But the judges’ version says the office didn’t have enough staff to run a 24-hour operation, which they say was necessary to meet the counting deadlines.
The elections office “had insufficient staff to run more than one shift of operators” of its high-speed vote-counting machines during the machine recount, wrote Judges Betsy Benson and Deborah Carpenter-Toye in the report obtained from the Florida Department of State. The judges and Snipes comprised the county’s Canvassing Board.
The elections office “solved this problem by flying in additional staff provided by the equipment vendor, and borrowing two additional [machines] from another location in Florida,” the judges wrote.
Despite those efforts, the county’s machine recount was rejected by the state for being two minutes late.
The judges said officials from the state Division of Elections, who were present, were partly to blame. They didn’t give “appropriate direction” to upload the results to the state website. With the deadline ap-
proaching, officials in Tallahassee notified the elections office the numbers had to be entered manually.
The elections office said it had 4,015 poll workers at 577 locations on Election Day and 68 office staff. The report doesn’t include staffing numbers for the recount.
Attempts to reach Snipes and her attorneys were unsuccessful Thursday.
The self-evaluation and addendum cover many of issues that emerged previously during coverage of the election and recount. Among them:
■ Twenty-five ballots were left off the county’s initial vote report because they had markings where the canvassing board had to determine “voter intent.” They were not brought to the board in time to be included in that report, the judges said, in part because of security issues — “Including a threat against a public official.” The elections office where the count was taking place was being swarmed outside by protesters forcing officials to delay the meeting while security was beefed up in the building and a metal detector set up for visitors to go through.
■ Connectivity problems between early-voting sites and the electronic voter registration system forced 205 early voters to cast provisional ballots because their signatures could not be verified.
■ The 205 provisional ballots were approved by elections office staff, which did its own verification of them without bringing them to the Canvassing Board for its determination. The board rejected 23 of the provisional ballots where it said the signatures didn’t match. However, the board counted all the votes because it could not reunite the ballots with the opened, rejected envelopes.
■ Seven precincts were unable to transmit their vote totals to the elections office on election night because of equipment malfunctions. Officials had to bring the results on electronic media to the regional office, which added to the delay in reporting results on election night.
■ The elections office misplaced 2,040 ballots during the election recount.
■ Eight ballot scanners had to be replaced at precincts during early voting because of sensor and jamming issues, and 20 had to be replaced on Election Day.
In conclusion, Benson and Carpenter-Toye said: “Despite the availability of the canvassing board to promptly canvass all materials, the board frequently had no ballots to canvass as the [elections] staff had not prepared the necessary material.”