Rubio lays blame on Broward County Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes for election problems.
As partisans lined up for war over Florida’s election results, vote counting and looming recounts, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio aimed fire Thursday at Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes.
Rubio excoriated the elections supervisor in series of messages he posted on Twitter.
“A U.S. Senate seat & a statewide cabinet officer are now potentially in the hands of an elections supervisor with a history of incompetence & of blatant violations of state & federal laws,” Rubio thundered in one of his afternoon commentaries.
He complained that vote counting in Florida’s other 66 counties was much farther along than in Broward.
“#BayCounty was hit by a Cat 4 Hurricane just 4 weeks ago, yet managed to count votes & submit timely results. Yet over 41 hours after polls closed #Broward elections office is still counting votes?” Rubio said.
Bay County reported 63,768 votes cast. Broward had 707,223 cast late Thursday afternoon as counting continued.
The senator went on to argue that the slow pace was more than “annoying incompetence.” Instead, he warned it is an indication of the potential for mischief, rather than slow counting. Rubio said Democratic lawyers were planning to “steal” the Senate election and one of the Florida Cabinet races. Presumably that refers to the agriculture commissioner contest between Matt Caldwell and Nikki Fried. The two candidates were separated Thursday evening by 470 votes — out of more than 8 million cast.
U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch, a Democrat who represents parts of Broward and Palm Beach counties, visited the Broward elections office on Thursday, and later said on Twitter that Rubio “should not wildly speculate & make reckless charges questioning the legitimacy of elections. Instead let’s count every single vote, shall we? Marco, it doesn’t even take six words, let alone six tweets to say, ‘EVERY. VOTE. SHOULD. BE. COUNTED.’”
Former U.S. Rep. Gwen Graham ridiculed Rubio’s assertions. “Utter Trumpian BS, Senator. Instead of spewing false conspiracy theories, let our democracy work. Just, chill,” she wrote on Twitter. Graham was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.
Rubio seized on a comment from Snipes that she didn’t know how many ballots remained to be counted, and he raised suspicions that something was wrong because her office “isn’t reporting hourly or regularly, but rather releasing thousands of additional votes, often in the overnight hours, that are chipping away at GOP leads.”
Counting votes in Broward — whether it’s done on election night or after — is virtually guaran teed to produce more Democratic than Republican ballots and reduce the GOP’s advantage statewide. That happens in every election, regardless of timing.
Broward is the biggest Democratic county in the state. More than 50 percent of the county’s registered voters are Democrats. Republicans make up 21 percent of the county’s registered voters — in third place behind no party affiliation voters, who make up 28 percent.
Because of the delay, Rubio wrote, Democratic lawyers “are descending on #Florida. They have been very clear they aren’t here to make sure every vote is counted. They are here to change the results of election; & Broward is where they plan to do it.”
Republicans have their own legal forces in place as well. Among those at the Broward Elections Office on Thursday was the high profile Fort Lauderdale lawyer Bill Scherer. He was one of the lawyers involved in the 2000 election recount in the George W. Bush-Al Gore presidential election.
Snipes was appointed elections supervisor in 2003 by then-Gov. Jeb Bush. Scherer said he’s “been having to file lawsuits against Brenda Snipes ever since for voting irregularities in Broward County . ... Brenda Snipes and her election apparatus causes everybody to have doubts about where these votes are, how many are left.”
Cynthia Busch, chairwoman of the Broward Democratic Party, said Thursday people are frustrated by the time the vote counting is taking but urged calm.
“People are like, ‘How come Dr. Snipes isn’t done?’ ” Busch said, “Everyone needs to be patient.”
The lengthy ballots need to be scanned into tabulation equipment, and that takes time. “You can only process them so quickly. They have to go through a machine. It’s 10 pages. They’ll get them done,” Busch said.
Rubio said Snipes’s office “has a history of violating the law.” He attached a news article about a court ruling against Snipes.
While a lawsuit seeking access to ballots from a 2016 congressional primary was pending, Snipes’ office prematurely destroyed the ballots.
She called it a mistake. A circuit court judge ruled in May that her office broke federal and state law by destroying the ballots too soon after the August 2016 primary, while the lawsuit was pending.
She OK’d the ballot destruction a year after the primary. The law requires preservation of the ballots for 22 months.
Snipes has had many critics over the years. In 2016, for example, she was sued because some mail ballots did not include a question about a state constitutional amendment on allowing medical marijuana.
Later in 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign, Roger Stone, the dirty trickster and sometimes confidante of President Donald Trump spread the word that Snipes secretly met with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Stone promised pictures would back up his assertion, but he never produced the proof he promised. After the election, Stone recanted and said he’d repeated incorrect information.
Snipes wasn’t immediately available for comment after Rubio’s string of Twitter comments.
Earlier Thursday, she said she did not want to be “guesstimating,” when asked how long the tabulation would take. She said the volume of mail-in ballots received that has made the count take so long.