Snipes wants more election equipment

Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes is spending another $346,000 to buy more election equipment to ensure her office can tally votes in a timely fashion during the Nov. 6 election.

Her office wasn’t able to finish counting thousands of mailed-in votes in the August primaries until the next day, leaving the outcome of several races in doubt.

“There were some concerns we could expect major delays,” County Administrator Bertha Henry told county commissioners at a budget hearing Tuesday.

The request surprised commissioners, who questioned why the elections office’s original request wasn’t sufficient to get the job done. However, they said they didn’t want the county’s results to be delayed again.

“I don’t want to be 67th in 67 counties again in voting, and we have consistently been the bottom of the barrel getting our voting results in,” Commissioner Nan Rich said. “If it’s going to be an issue here, I think we need to take care of it.”

The elections office has five newly purchased highspeed digital scanners to tabulate mailed-in ballots that Snipes said “performed well” during the August primaries, but it now plans to purchase three more. That’s because instead of the August two-page ballots, the November ballots will be six pages, Snipes said, which will reduce the number of ballots that can be tabulated in an hour’s time from 1,500 to about 500.

“Although these machines are capable of running approximately 3,000 pages per hour, the ballot for the November election is now at six pages in length, which means approximately four

million pieces of paper to be processed on the first run during this election,” Snipes wrote in her request to the county. “If we have county-wide recounts as we did in the past election, we will be challenged to be able to meet the results-reporting timelines.”

Commissioner Dale Holness said part of the need was because of the lengthy ballot and high voter interest. The ballot has 12 state amendments and 11 county charter referendums, as well as state, county and city elections.