Officials to send Scott letter on alleged 2015 voter fraud

LOXAHATCHEE GROVES — In a largely ceremonial move, the Loxahatchee Groves council last week approved sending a letter to Gov. Rick Scott requesting a special prosecutor to look into alleged voter fraud in the town’s 2015 election.

By a unanimous vote, the council approved the request from former candidate Keith Harris, who lost the race for Seat 3 by nine votes to former councilman Ryan Liang, whose term ended last month after he chose not to run for re-election.

Harris spoke at the beginning of the April 3 council meeting and again at the end, calling for the letter after his attorney, Rick Jarolem, found new evidence they say points to further wrongdoing in the 2015 race.

In 2016, Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigators determined there was probable cause that Liang’s campaign improperly ordered more than 100 absentee ballots from Liang’s home computer. But the State Attorney’s Office said while there was enough evidence to file charges against Liang’s mother Philomena Liu, a conviction could not be certain because they could not prove who was sitting at the computer when the requests were made. They declined to file charges.

It is a third-degree felony in Florida to request absentee ballots for anyone other than family members. The number of absentee ballot requests for Loxahatchee Groves more than tripled from 85 in 2013 to 304 in 2015, according to Supervisor of Election’s Office records.

In interviews following the election, Liang denied knowledge of any impropriety within his campaign.

“I’m just going to wait for the State Attorney’s Office to clear it all up. I’m not entirely sure of everything just yet,” he told The Palm Beach Post in 2015. “I know that we encouraged a lot of folks to go with absentee ballots, and that’s as much as I know right now.”

But in a 2015 interview with The Post’s news partners at WPTV NewsChannel 5, cited by the FDLE in its investigation, Liang admitted his mother had made the requests for absentee ballots. He said she felt “really bad about it.”

At last week’s council meeting, Harris presented information from a deposition Jarolem took from Sandy Chiu, a Miami-based attorney who was listed as having voted by absentee ballot in the 2015 Loxahatchee Groves election. In the deposition, Chiu said she did not vote in that election.

“It wasn’t only (Harris) that was disenfranchised with that election, it was all of us in this community,” Councilman Todd McLendon said at last week’s meeting. “We all know that there were absentee ballots that were illegally procured. The town paid for those. The town financially

By a unanimous vote, the council approved the request from former candidate Keith Harris, who lost the race for Seat 3 by nine votes to former councilman Ryan Liang, whose term ended last month after he chose not to run for re-election.

lost in that.”

McLendon said he and another resident went through the absentee ballot signatures from the 2015 election and “some of them weren’t even close.”

The statute of limitations on a third-degree felony is three years, Jarolem said, an issue McLendon raised in the meeting.

“Even if they found who it was that did it, they’ve dragged their feet and dropped that ball for three years and we’re past that statute of limitations,” McLendon said.

Councilwoman Joyce Batcheler, who was elected unopposed in March when Liang declined to run for re-election, agreed the council should write the letter.

“Clearly there was a problem with the elections and we should have gotten as a town more behind Keith at the time,” she said.

Mayor Dave Browning said the letter needs to include the new evidence.

“It was a frustrating thing at the time, because I always felt Keith was right, but there was a chain of command we went through,” he said, noting that he was part of the group that certified the 2015 election.

“We realize that there was a great injustice done,” Browning said. Jarolem said he is drafting the letter for the council to sign.

For Harris, the vote was validation of his three-year struggle for justice. He has spent $35,000 in legal fees since 2015, and is in the process of selling his 5.75-acre Loxahatchee Groves property.

As he heard the council voice its support for his crusade — the first open support from the board since the election — Harris said he became emotional and had to leave council chambers.

“It was choking me up to hear that, finally,” he said.