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Charlemagne

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Broward recount shenanigans: 46,000 Democrat votes “found” after election day, with more to come

by Brian Burgess Nov 8, 2018

********CURRENT VOTE MARGINS as of 8:40am Friday********

U.S. Senate – Rick Scott leads Bill Nelson by 15,092 15,079 15,068 votes

FL Governor – Ron DeSantis leads Andrew Gillum by 36,223 36,219 36,199 votes

UPDATE: This story has been updated to reflect that at approximately 2pm Eastern, the Broward County Supervisor of Elections posted another 11,300 votes (which broke 70-30 in favor of Democrats). This new tranche of ballots triggered a mandatory machine recount in the governor’s race and a hand recount in the U.S. Senate race.

UPDATE #2: After another update sometime after 5pm, Nelson has gained another 2,000 votes, cutting Scott’s statewide lead to just 15,092 votes. It is unclear where these last 2,000 votes came from.

UPDATE #3: Scott has ordered FDLE to investigate Broward County’s handling of ballots. Attorneys for Rick Scott have filed a lawsuit in the 17th Judicial Circuit against Broward SOE Brenda Snipes. The lawsuit demands access to public records in an effort to know how many ballots have been cast, how many have been counted and how many ballots remain to be counted. Snipes maintains that she does not have this information.

Republicans Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis may be in trouble. Despite clear margins of victory for both men on election night, Democrat election supervisors in Broward and Palm Beach counties say they aren’t done tallying up votes. Two days after the polls closed on Tuesday night, Democrat candidates Bill Nelson and Andrew Gillum benefited from nearly 46,000 Democrat votes that have been “found” in those counties and added to the statewide election outcome, throwing Florida into a partisan uproar over mandatory hand and machine recounts and the possibility that the integrity of the election process has been compromised.

Nelson already has his lawyer promising that Nelson is going to prevail, and a close advisor to Gillum posted on social media that he is aware of at least 20,000 “more” ballots that he alleges have yet to be counted:

We are now 0.02% away from a legally required machine recount of @AndrewGillumvs. @RonDeSantisFL.

42,948 votes seperate the two and I’m told at least 20k votes are left to count in @BrowardVotes.pic.twitter.com/Px8L5rn9Ac

— Kevin Cate (@KevinCate) November 8, 2018

But it is unclear how the Gillum camp could possibly know the number of outstanding ballots – if any – especially since Broward County Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes claims she has no idea how many ballots remain to be counted:

“Not sure. I’m really not sure. But we are working on those,” Snipes told CBS4 News in Miami.

Republicans have expressed frustration with Snipes, who has a long history of election “snafus.” Just days before the 2016 presidential election, Republican poll watchers discovered that Snipes and her team were illegally opening vote by mail ballots – which traditionally come from Republican voters – behind closed doors and away from the supervision of the canvassing board, whose job it is to oversee and certify the election outcome.

“This looks like intentional incompetence,” said one Republican strategist who declined to be identified. “We see it every election cycle down there. Democrat election supervisors can’t really be this incompetent, so it raises the question of whether or not they are intentionally failing to protect the integrity of the vote counting process. There’s only one reason to do that, and that’s to rig the outcome for Nelson and Gillum.”

On election night, Florida governor Rick Scott led incumbent Senator Bill Nelson by nearly 60,000 votes. The next day, Scott watched his lead inexplicably shrink. Overnight, enough new Democrat votes had been “discovered” to close the gap by 22,000 ballots. Later that day, Scott watched as Democrats in Broward added another batch of Democrat ballots favoring Nelson. This time around, it was enough to shrink Scott’s lead by another 10,000 votes.

The oddities in Broward continued again on Thursday. When Scott went to bed last night, he held a close but still decisive 30,000 vote lead. When he woke this morning, like clockwork, Broward County again had added a large tranche of Democrat votes. At about 2pm, Broward had discovered another 11,300 votes and when they were counted, they broke roughly 70-30 percent for Democrats. As of tonight (updated at 8pm), Scott leads Bill Nelson by just 22,000 17,344 15,092 15,079 votes, requiring a mandatory hand recount.

Those new votes also reduced Governor-elect Ron DeSantis’s margin of victory to just 38,515 36,223 votes, or 0.47 0.44 percentage points (as of 8pm Thursday) based on the total turnout of 8.2 million votes cast. Anything less than 0.5% triggers an automatic machine recount.

Representatives from both the Scott and DeSantis campaigns say they have attorneys and representatives on site in Broward and Palm Beach, attempting to monitor the situation, but some Republicans are concerned about partisan poll workers gaming the system during a machine recount, where poll workers manually feed ballots into a machine, rather than the actual voters themselves, as happens on election day. Worse, in the case of hand recount, Snipes and her staff may be free to determine the voter’s “intent” rather than simply allowing machines to read the ballots.

“Once we get to that level,” said the Republican strategist, “it’s going to get crazy. With Brenda Snipes running the recount in Broward County, Florida voters should be very, very concerned about the integrity of this process.”,

https://thecapitolist.com/broward-recount-shenanigans-over-38000-democrat-votes-found-since-election-day-with-more-to-come/?fbclid=IwAR00wMZf_s1UM1WRVX_hRzTtrc-lZlDJXnc7KTdQXC2im0o5CZw275BICQw
 
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Charlemagne

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Voter suppression really may have made the difference for Republicans in Georgia

And that could send a message to Republicans nationwide.

By German Lopez@germanrlopezgerman.lopez@vox.com Nov 7, 2018, 10:00am EST

There was good news and bad news for voting rights in the 2018 midterm elections.

The good: Florida restored voting rights to more than 1 million people with felony records, which amounts to the biggest enfranchisement since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the women’s suffrage movement. This is a big moment for voting rights — way more people now have the right to vote! — but it remains unclear how this will change the swing state in the future.

Maryland, Michigan, and Nevada also approved ballot measures that could help expand voting in different ways, such as allowing same-day voter registration or enacting automatic voter registration.

And Kris Kobach, a vociferous supporter of more voting restrictions, lost the governor’s race in Kansas.

The bad: Republican candidates that benefited from voter suppression efforts, particularly Brian Kemp in Georgia’s governor race and Kevin Cramer in North Dakota’s Senate race, are set for victories. The results may send a message that emboldens future voting restrictions, given that, at the very least, benefiting from steps that prevented voters from voting didn’t seem to hurt these candidates.

Meanwhile, Arkansas and North Carolina voters also approved ballot initiatives that require photo IDs to vote, adding more barriers to the ballot box.

It’s the bad news that I’m really concerned with here. The research suggests that the voter suppression efforts so far don’t have a huge impact on electoral outcomes. But the impact disproportionately hurts Democratic and especially minority voters. Given that elections can be so close (including Georgia’s gubernatorial race), more restrictions really could play a decisive factor.

And since, based on Tuesday night’s results, voters either don’t mind or in some cases actually favor such restrictions, Republicans may now be emboldened to do even more.

This could get really ugly for American democracy.

Voter suppression in Georgia and North Dakota

The most concerning results for voting rights advocates were in Georgia and North Dakota.

In Georgia, Kemp remained in his position as Georgia’s secretary of state — the office that oversees elections in Georgia — even while running for governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams.

Kemp has carried out mass purges of the voter rolls, ostensibly to remove dead people and people who haven’t voted in recent elections from the records, but in such a sweeping way that Democrats fear it will keep voters, particularly minority voters, off the rolls.

Kemp’s office also put 53,000 voter registrations on hold, nearly 70 percent of which are for black voters, by using an error-prone “exact match” system, which stops voter registrations if there are any discrepancies, down to dropped hyphens, with other government records.

And in the days before Election Day, Kemp accused Democrats, through the secretary of state’s website and with no evidence, of attempting to hack the state’s voter registration system. As elections law expert Richard Hasen wrote in Slate, this was “perhaps the most outrageous example of election administration partisanship in the modern era.”

Other problems also popped up in Georgia throughout the day, including long voting lines and technical errors. That led to voting places extending their hours very late into the night.

In North Dakota’s Senate race, meanwhile, Republicans tried different stunts to skew the race against Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND). After Heitkamp won in 2012 with strong Native American support, Republicans began discussing new voter ID rules. That led to a new requirement that voters show they have a current residential address to vote.

The move prevented as many as thousands of Native Americans from voting since many of them live on reservations and, as a result, use PO boxes instead of residential addresses. And while Native American groups tried to get voters out to make up for any negative effect, the efforts didn’t appear to work, or at least save Heitkamp.

But were either the Georgia or North Dakota voter suppression efforts enough to flip the races in Republicans’ favor?

It’s hard to say. As I’ve written before, the research suggests that restrictions on voting, from photo IDs to early voting cuts, have a small effect — a few percentage points — on election turnout.

The key is that minority and Democratic voters are disproportionately affected. Since minority Americans are less likely to have flexible work hours or own cars, they might have a harder time affording a voter ID or getting to the right place (typically a DMV or BMV office) to obtain a voter ID.

For the same reasons, they may rely more on early voting opportunities to cast a ballot, or require a voting place they can walk to or reach by public transit. And they may have problems overcoming other hurdles, like having to appeal a voter registration or having to stay in line longer.

Based on the results so far, Cramer, the Republican, won the North Dakota Senate race by far too large of a margin — nearly 28,000 votes, or 10 percentage points — for the voter suppression efforts to explain his win. As ugly as the targeted suppression of Native Americans was, this seems like a case of a red state returning to Republican hands.

In Georgia, however, the governor’s race is close enough that Kemp’s tactics could have made a difference. With almost all precincts reporting, Kemp may have won the governor’s race by a little more than 85,000 votes, or under 3 percentage points. (But this race isn’t yet called and could go to a run-off if Kemp doesn’t get a majority of the votes.) That’s fairly close to the kind of margin in which voter suppression efforts could have won the day.

And even if the tactics weren’t the sole reason Republicans won in these two states, the new voting restrictions certainly didn’t hurt the GOP.

The Republican victories may lead to more voter suppression

Republicans, of course, argue that their measures are not about stifling voters or swinging elections, but preventing voter fraud. That’s the rationale Republicans have used time and again to enact new restrictions on voting in the past few years, particularly after a Supreme Court ruling in 2013, Shelby County v. Holder, that weakened the Voting Rights Act.

And they’ve been very successful: Since 2011, 24 states — all but five via Republican-controlled governments — have passed new voting restrictions, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy think tank.

But basically everyone knows that Republicans’ justification for these voting restrictions is bullshit.

For one, voter fraud is extremely rare. There is a lot of research backing this up, but, based on one investigation in 2012 by the News21 journalism project, there were 0.000003 alleged cases of fraud for every national general election vote cast between 2000 and part of 2012 — and as many as half of those alleged cases weren’t credible. Voter fraud is simply not a big deal in America’s electoral system.

In fact, Republicans have repeatedly admitted that their claims about voting restrictions are bullshit. As longtime North Carolina Republican consultant Carter Wrenn in 2016 told the Washington Post, “Look, if African Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, they would have kept early voting right where it was.”

So Republicans are carrying out voting restrictions to stop Democrats, and particularly minority voters who are likely to go Democrat, from voting. If the GOP concludes that the restrictions helped push Kemp to victory in Georgia and unseat Heitkamp in North Dakota, there could be a real incentive to continue making voting harder and harder across the US.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/7/18071438/midterm-election-results-voting-rights-georgia-florida
 
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U.S. Elections Are Neither Free Nor Fair. States Need to Open Their Doors to More Observers.

Mehdi Hasan

November 5 2018, 7:37 a.m.

VOTER SUPPRESSION. DISENFRANCHISEMENT.

Gerrymandering. Can Tuesday’s midterms in the United States really be considered free and fair elections?

Perhaps we should consult with the experts. Few Americans have heard of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE; even fewer are aware that OSCE observers have been keeping tabs on U.S. elections since 2002, at the invitation of the U.S. State Department.

On October 26, the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in Washington, D.C., issued an interim report on the 2018 midterms. It didn’t make for pleasant reading. “The right to vote is subject to many limitations,” warned the report, “with racial minorities disproportionately impacted.”

This isn’t the first time the OSCE has sounded the alarm. In the wake of the 2016 presidential race, OSCE observers praised the U.S. for holding a “highly competitive” election while also criticizing a campaign “characterized by harsh personal attacks, as well as intolerant rhetoric” and changes to election rules that “were often motivated by partisan interests, adding undue obstacles for voters.”

“Suffrage rights,” the 2016 observers concluded, were “not guaranteed for all citizens, leaving sections of the population without the right to vote.”

Is that what a free and fair election is supposed to look like? It should be a source of shame that the United States, once held up as a model to emerging democracies around the globe, now needs outside observers to remind it of its most basic democratic obligations. The OSCE mission to the U.S. began in 2002, in response to the “serious shortcomings” in the 2000 presidential election, which saw tens of thousands of black voters in Florida purged from electoral rolls and prevented from voting.

But have these international observers succeeded in nudging the U.S. in a more democratic direction? Not quite. The OSCE’s final report on the 2016 presidential election issued a series of recommendations to U.S. officials, including:

• “To meet requirements regarding the equality of the vote, states should consider the establishment of independent redistricting commissions to draw district boundaries free from political interference.”

• “Election officials at the state and county level should be released from their duties if they are candidates in elections.”

• “Restrictions on voting rights for persons with criminal convictions should be reviewed to ensure that all limitations are proportionate.”

• “Authorities should review existing measures to further reduce the number of unregistered voters, including addressing undue obstacles and burdensome procedures faced by marginalized sections of the population.

• “States should refrain from introducing voter identification requirements that have or could have a discriminatory impact on voters.”

TWO YEARS LATER, none of these recommendations have been acted on by U.S officials, either at the federal or state levels. On the contrary, since the 2016 election, at least nine states have brazenly enacted further restrictions on voting which have had a clear “discriminatory impact” on voters.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Since 2000, the story of the Republican Party’s approach to elections, in fact, is one of racist voter suppression; of targeting minority voters with “almost surgical precision,” to borrow a line from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. And Republicans are equal opportunity vote suppressors. They have disenfranchised and purged people of color from a wide range of communities, across a wide range of states. “No child left behind” was the name given to Republican education reforms in the era of George W. Bush. “No minority left behind” could be the tagline of Republican voter suppression efforts in the era of Donald Trump.

Native Americans? Check. In North Dakota, where Democrat Heidi Heitkamp won her Senate race in 2012 by a razor-thin margin of less than 3,000 votes, 6 in 10 Native Americans — who tend to lean Democratic — live on reservations and lack street addresses. In 2013, the state’s Republicans passed a law requiring voters to present identification that displays a street address, which was upheld by the Republican-led Supreme Court in October.

African-Americans? Check. In Georgia, where Republican Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams are locked in a tight race for the governor’s mansion, an Associated Press investigation in October found that 53,000 voter registrations were on hold, of which “nearly 70 percent” were black.

Latino Americans? Check. In Dodge City, Kansas, which is 60 percent Latino, Republican officials moved the town’s sole polling station “to a tough-to-access location outside the city limits.” Voters, literally, have to “get out of Dodge” in order to cast their ballots on Tuesday.

Incidentally, to make matters worse, in both Georgia and Kansas, the Republican secretaries of state, who are in charge of the election process, are also running as the Republican candidates for governor. Thus, their Democratic opponents, in the words of Rolling Stone’s Jamil Smith, are “competing against a rival who is also the referee.” So much for elected officials being “released from their duties if they are candidates in elections,” as per the OSCE’s 2016 recommendation.

THE UNITED STATES is in dire need of election observers. Such observers, according to Duke University’s Judith Kelley, “can — under some conditions — lead to improvements in conduct and quality of elections.”

Domestic observers, however, are few and far between — especially since a 2013 Supreme Court ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act and “severely curtailed” the Justice Department’s power to deploy federal election monitors to states with a history of racial discrimination. As a result, the 2016 presidential election saw one of the smallest deployments of domestic observers since 1964.

Meanwhile, international observers — in the form of the OSCE, which has spent the past 20 years observing more than 300 elections in 56 countries — are subject to a host of constraints on U.S. soil.

For a start, as it’s the midterms, the OSCE mission is miniscule. It features a “13-member core team” based in Washington, D.C., and only “36 long-term observers deployed throughout the country.”

Second, contrary to the hysterical claims from some conservatives, they are OSCE observers, not United Nations monitors. As the Atlantic’s Uri Friedman has observed, “The difference is that observers don’t intervene in the political process,” so OSCE observers have to report voter complaints “to U.S. authorities rather than taking action themselves.”

Third, as the OSCEs interim report revealed in October, “several state political and electoral authorities have declined to meet with … observers,” while “explicit restrictions on observation of voting by international observers are in place in 18 states.” And guess what? The majority of those 18 states have introduced “significant voter restrictions” since 2010, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Despite OSCE-participating countries, including the United States, having agreed in 1990 to allow each other to observe elections, on the basis that such observers “can enhance the electoral process,” individual U.S. states do have the power to block international observers from … observing. In 2012, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott even threatened OSCE observers with criminal prosecution for violating state law.

You might think a healthy and vibrant democracy wouldn’t have any qualms about conducting its elections out in the open for all to see. That it wouldn’t have anything to hide or cover up. That it would welcome international observers as a way of setting an example for the rest of the world.

The problem is that the U.S., plagued by rampant voter suppression and partisan election officials, is far from a healthy or vibrant democracy. These days, as the midterms once again remind us, it’s more of a banana republic.

https://theintercept.com/2018/11/05/u-s-elections-are-neither-free-nor-fair-states-need-to-open-their-doors-to-more-observers/
 
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Charlemagne said:
U.S. Elections Are Neither Free Nor Fair. States Need to Open Their Doors to More Observers.

Mehdi Hasan

November 5 2018, 7:37 a.m.

VOTER SUPPRESSION. DISENFRANCHISEMENT.

Gerrymandering. Can Tuesday’s midterms in the United States really be considered free and fair elections?

Perhaps we should consult with the experts. Few Americans have heard of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE; even fewer are aware that OSCE observers have been keeping tabs on U.S. elections since 2002, at the invitation of the U.S. State Department.

On October 26, the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in Washington, D.C., issued an interim report on the 2018 midterms. It didn’t make for pleasant reading. “The right to vote is subject to many limitations,” warned the report, “with racial minorities disproportionately impacted.”

This isn’t the first time the OSCE has sounded the alarm. In the wake of the 2016 presidential race, OSCE observers praised the U.S. for holding a “highly competitive” election while also criticizing a campaign “characterized by harsh personal attacks, as well as intolerant rhetoric” and changes to election rules that “were often motivated by partisan interests, adding undue obstacles for voters.”

“Suffrage rights,” the 2016 observers concluded, were “not guaranteed for all citizens, leaving sections of the population without the right to vote.”

Is that what a free and fair election is supposed to look like? It should be a source of shame that the United States, once held up as a model to emerging democracies around the globe, now needs outside observers to remind it of its most basic democratic obligations. The OSCE mission to the U.S. began in 2002, in response to the “serious shortcomings” in the 2000 presidential election, which saw tens of thousands of black voters in Florida purged from electoral rolls and prevented from voting.

But have these international observers succeeded in nudging the U.S. in a more democratic direction? Not quite. The OSCE’s final report on the 2016 presidential election issued a series of recommendations to U.S. officials, including:

• “To meet requirements regarding the equality of the vote, states should consider the establishment of independent redistricting commissions to draw district boundaries free from political interference.”

• “Election officials at the state and county level should be released from their duties if they are candidates in elections.”

• “Restrictions on voting rights for persons with criminal convictions should be reviewed to ensure that all limitations are proportionate.”

• “Authorities should review existing measures to further reduce the number of unregistered voters, including addressing undue obstacles and burdensome procedures faced by marginalized sections of the population.

• “States should refrain from introducing voter identification requirements that have or could have a discriminatory impact on voters.”

TWO YEARS LATER, none of these recommendations have been acted on by U.S officials, either at the federal or state levels. On the contrary, since the 2016 election, at least nine states have brazenly enacted further restrictions on voting which have had a clear “discriminatory impact” on voters.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Since 2000, the story of the Republican Party’s approach to elections, in fact, is one of racist voter suppression; of targeting minority voters with “almost surgical precision,” to borrow a line from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. And Republicans are equal opportunity vote suppressors. They have disenfranchised and purged people of color from a wide range of communities, across a wide range of states. “No child left behind” was the name given to Republican education reforms in the era of George W. Bush. “No minority left behind” could be the tagline of Republican voter suppression efforts in the era of Donald Trump.

Native Americans? Check. In North Dakota, where Democrat Heidi Heitkamp won her Senate race in 2012 by a razor-thin margin of less than 3,000 votes, 6 in 10 Native Americans — who tend to lean Democratic — live on reservations and lack street addresses. In 2013, the state’s Republicans passed a law requiring voters to present identification that displays a street address, which was upheld by the Republican-led Supreme Court in October.

African-Americans? Check. In Georgia, where Republican Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams are locked in a tight race for the governor’s mansion, an Associated Press investigation in October found that 53,000 voter registrations were on hold, of which “nearly 70 percent” were black.

Latino Americans? Check. In Dodge City, Kansas, which is 60 percent Latino, Republican officials moved the town’s sole polling station “to a tough-to-access location outside the city limits.” Voters, literally, have to “get out of Dodge” in order to cast their ballots on Tuesday.

Incidentally, to make matters worse, in both Georgia and Kansas, the Republican secretaries of state, who are in charge of the election process, are also running as the Republican candidates for governor. Thus, their Democratic opponents, in the words of Rolling Stone’s Jamil Smith, are “competing against a rival who is also the referee.” So much for elected officials being “released from their duties if they are candidates in elections,” as per the OSCE’s 2016 recommendation.

THE UNITED STATES is in dire need of election observers. Such observers, according to Duke University’s Judith Kelley, “can — under some conditions — lead to improvements in conduct and quality of elections.”

Domestic observers, however, are few and far between — especially since a 2013 Supreme Court ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act and “severely curtailed” the Justice Department’s power to deploy federal election monitors to states with a history of racial discrimination. As a result, the 2016 presidential election saw one of the smallest deployments of domestic observers since 1964.

Meanwhile, international observers — in the form of the OSCE, which has spent the past 20 years observing more than 300 elections in 56 countries — are subject to a host of constraints on U.S. soil.

For a start, as it’s the midterms, the OSCE mission is miniscule. It features a “13-member core team” based in Washington, D.C., and only “36 long-term observers deployed throughout the country.”

Second, contrary to the hysterical claims from some conservatives, they are OSCE observers, not United Nations monitors. As the Atlantic’s Uri Friedman has observed, “The difference is that observers don’t intervene in the political process,” so OSCE observers have to report voter complaints “to U.S. authorities rather than taking action themselves.”

Third, as the OSCEs interim report revealed in October, “several state political and electoral authorities have declined to meet with … observers,” while “explicit restrictions on observation of voting by international observers are in place in 18 states.” And guess what? The majority of those 18 states have introduced “significant voter restrictions” since 2010, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Despite OSCE-participating countries, including the United States, having agreed in 1990 to allow each other to observe elections, on the basis that such observers “can enhance the electoral process,” individual U.S. states do have the power to block international observers from … observing. In 2012, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott even threatened OSCE observers with criminal prosecution for violating state law.

You might think a healthy and vibrant democracy wouldn’t have any qualms about conducting its elections out in the open for all to see. That it wouldn’t have anything to hide or cover up. That it would welcome international observers as a way of setting an example for the rest of the world.

The problem is that the U.S., plagued by rampant voter suppression and partisan election officials, is far from a healthy or vibrant democracy. These days, as the midterms once again remind us, it’s more of a banana republic.

https://theintercept.com/2018/11/05/u-s-elections-are-neither-free-nor-fair-states-need-to-open-their-doors-to-more-observers/
Click to expand...
http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/10...votes-cast-non-citizens/#.W-dvqGhmOUY.twitter


In Palm Beach County, Democrats Argue To Count Votes Cast By Non-Citizens
Something is rotten in Palm Beach County, where Democrats want to count the votes of non-citizens.
NOVEMBER 10, 2018 By D.C. McAllister
Something is rotten in Palm Beach County Florida elections, where Democrats want to count votes cast by non-citizens.

During review of provisional ballots to determine whether a recount is justified in the tight Florida governor, senate, and agriculture commission races, Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher identified a voter as a non-citizen and declared that the ballot would not be counted.


Attorneys representing the Democratic candidate for senate Bill Nelson and the Democratic candidate for governor Andrew Gillum objected. A copy of the uncertified transcript shows the interaction.




Chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party Michael Barnett attests to the validity of the transcript. He told The Federalist that several Republican lawyers and party officials heard the back and forth between the canvassing board and attorney’s from the Gillum and Nelson campaigns.

“I would think this is something we could all agree on—that non-citizens shouldn’t vote, but evidently that’s not the case with Democrats,” Barnett said. “It’s really sad that we are having to deal with this in a close election. It just goes to show the depths they will go to in order to win.”

The canvassing board was tasked with reviewing ballots after irregularities were reported in Broward and Palm Beach counties. As of Friday afternoon these were the only two counties in Florida that hadn’t completed counting absentee votes. Broward had also failed to report early voting ballots, which is a violation of state law that requires local canvassing boards to report all early voting and absentee results to the state within 30 minutes after the polls close.

When tabulating the votes on election night, Broward County’s results showed significantly fewer votes than other races on the ballot—25,000. Over the next several days, election officials scrambled to add early in-person votes and absentee ballots to the count. This increased numbers for the Democrats, moving the races into recount margins.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio accused the Broward County elections office of blatantly violating state law. “No early votes have been case since Sunday,” he tweeted. “They had 2 days to tabulate them & submit to the state by 7:30 p.m. Tuesday as required by law. Yet as of latest update these are only partially completed.”

Barnett promised that Republicans are closely monitoring the recount as the canvassing boards review the ballots. “We want to make sure the Democrats don’t steal this election,” he said. “They’re trying everything they can to win even if it’s illegal.”

The Palm Beach County Democratic Party did not return inquires by The Federalist at the time of this report.
 
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Florida Orders Senate, Governor Race Recounts Amid Mystery Box Controversy

Update II: And President Trump has chimed in again, accusing Democrats of trying to "STEAL two big elections."


***

Update: Broward County has reportedly approved recounts in four Florida races, according to CNN, while the Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner has ordered them in tight races for Senate, Governor and Attorney General Commissioner, and has ordered a statewide machine recount.

As a noon deadline on Saturday to submit the election results approached, former GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis led Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum by less than 0.5%, which would require a machine recount.

In the race for Senate, Gov. Rick Scott's lead over Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson had shrunk to less than 0.25 percent - which would require a hand recount of all ballots unable to be tabulated by machine.

***

After a Florida Judge ordered Broward County Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes to allow for the immediate inspection of tens of thousands of ballots suddenly found after Democrat Sen. Bill Nelson lost to Republican Gov. Rick Scott, Snipes failed to abide by a 7 PM deadline set at the emergency hearing. Instead, workers were filmed by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) shuffling boxes into a truck, before he was forcibly removed by a police officer.


Earlier:


https://mobile.twitter.com/Tim_Cano...-trucks-rep-matt-gaetz-forcibly-removed-while

The scene was reminiscent of election night, when Broward County election officials were seen shuffling mystery boxes into a rented truck.



Tim Canova
✔
@Tim_Canova
Caught On Video: Concerned citizen sees ballots being transported in private vehicles & transferred to rented truck on Election night. This violates all chain of custody requirements for paper ballots. Were the ballots destroyed & replaced by set of fake ballots? Investigate now!
72.6K
11:51 AM - Nov 8, 2018 · Hollywood, FL


Gaetz vowed earlier to hold Snipes in contempt for missing the 7PM deadline.

https://youtu.be/lTirVxpf-Jo



The court was asked to intervene in a tight race for US Senate between Democratic incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson and Republican Gov. Rick Scott, after tens of thousands of ballots mysteriously appeared in Broward County, and another 15,000 in Palm Beach.

Lawyers for Snipes have argued that such a quick response would interfere with the count, while Rep. Bill Nelson has accused Republicans of trying to deny him a seat which he believes he will keep once all the votes are counted.


Rep. Bill Nelson (D-FL)
Republicans have conversely accused Democrats of trying to steal the election.


Who is Brenda Snipes?




Snipes has a sordid history in her 15-years on the job. In May 2018 a judge ruled that she violated federal and state laws by destroying ballots in a 2016 Congressional race in Tim Canova's bid to unseat Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the Democratic primary race.

In August, 2018 a Judge ordered Snipes to stop opening mail-in ballots in secret.
https://www.politico.com/states/flo...tee-ballot-dispute-with-broward-county-555553

In 2016, Snipes' office "accidentally" posted the results of an election 30 minutes before polls closed at 7 p.m., which was blamed on a private contractor.


Brenda Snipes
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Snipes is being backed by Bernie Sanders - who was admonished by Tim Canova for supporting the woman who destroyed ballots in his bid to unseat Wasserman Schultz.

We’re talking about Brenda Snipes who has been dishonest in the destruction of our ballots & counting votes outside the canvassing board? Both are illegal and anti-Demicratic! https://t.co/ofEzFgFT2L

— Tim Canova (@Tim_Canova) November 10, 2018
Rep. Gaetz, meanwhile, is being called a racist for trying to figure out what exactly is going on in Broward County.
 
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PornAddict

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https://www.lifezette.com/2017/07/shock-claim-florida-county-has-thousands-of-voters-over-age-100/


POLIZETTE
Shock Claim: Florida County Has ‘Thousands’ of Voters Over Age 100
State's second-most populous jurisdiction being sued in federal court for failure to maintain voter rolls
By Margaret Menge | Wednesday, July 26, 2017
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As Democrats and the mainstream media continue to insist that the president’s voter-fraud commission is a scheme to suppress votes, the head of elections in Broward County, Florida, is appearing in federal court in Miami as a defendant in a lawsuit where she will have to explain why Broward has more registered voters than citizens of voting age — a voter registration rate of 103 percent.
And she may also have to try to explain why Broward County, which has the highest number of Democratic voters in the state, has thousands of people over the age of 100 on its roll, and some as old as 130.
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Logan Churchwell, the head researcher for the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), which filed a suit against Broward County on behalf of the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU), told LifeZette on Tuesday that he counted “thousands” of centenarians on Broward’s voter roll in data the county submitted to the federal Election Assistance Commission following the 2014 election.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re dead,” he said, “but if you’re 130 years old, either find a gravestone, or call Guinness!”
The case illustrates the very real problem with so many voter rolls in the country, where elected supervisors have often neglected, or even refused, to take steps to ensure that the roll is an accurate list of eligible registered voters.
On Tuesday, Churchwell was waiting to testify in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in Miami about the failure of the Broward County supervisor of elections, Brenda Snipes, to maintain the county’s voter roll.
The roll, according to the ACRU, potentially includes tens of thousands of names of people who are ineligible to vote.
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The suit is being brought on behalf of the ACRU and Broward County resident Andrea Bellitto, whose vote, along with the votes of all other citizens in Broward County, could be canceled out by those voting illegally.
Broward County, home to Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood and Deerfield Beach, has 597,172 registered Democrats, 255,897 Republicans and 327,053 voters registered with no party affiliation. There are a total of 1,183,414 voters on the roll as of July 25, 2017.
In 2015, in studying Broward County voter data collected by the Election Assistance Commission, the Public Interest Legal Foundation found that at the time of the 2014 midterm elections, 103 percent of citizens of voting age in the county were registered to vote — an impossibility, of course. Four years earlier, in 2010, 106 percent of citizens of voting age in Broward County were registered to vote.
The foundation used official U.S. Census numbers to determine the number of citizens of voting age in the county. The Census numbers have never been disputed by any court, says Churchwell, and in a similar case filed by PILF against Wake County, North Carolina, the defendant settled the case, agreeing to do more to check for and remove ineligible voters.
Last year, ACRU sent letters to the office of the Broward County Supervisor of Elections requesting specific information about how the voter roll was being maintained, and how many ineligible voters were being removed and how often. Under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (“Motor Voter”), those in charge of voter rolls are required to maintain the roll to ensure that it is an accurate list of eligible voters.
Brenda Snipes, the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, responded to the letters by saying it was “implausible” that there are ineligible voters on the roll, insisting that she was following the requirements of the law, without providing specific evidence.
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“As soon as these jurisdictions get their back up and refuse to start answering questions, that’s when a lawsuit can start,” says Churchwell.
Snipes is a Democrat and former teacher who was appointed by then Gov. Jeb Bush in 2003 to serve as Broward’s elections chief. She has run every subsequent election, and has served as the supervisor of elections in Broward County continuously for the past 14 years. Snipes is the named defendant in the suit, but she is not alone.
After filing the suit, the local SEIU chapter representing health care workers in the county joined as an intervener, to defend against the charges and to prevent names from being removed from the Broward County voter roll. The group Demos, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from George Soros’ Open Society Institute, is contributing to Snipes’ legal defense and working to prevent any and all names from being removed from Broward’s voter roll.
Snipes and SEUI filed a motion to dismiss earlier this summer to try to have the case thrown out, but the judge, Beth Bloom, denied their request.
 
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azeri99

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I'm sorry photo ID should be mandatory to vote, if you can't get one piece of photo ID with all the options available, you should be deemed to stupid to vote.
 
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K Douglas

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Seems to be a ton of voting irregularities in these mid terms. Races swinging from being called Republican to being called Un Democrat or toss up. Case in point New Mexico-2.

The Republican candidate was declared winner on election night by approximately 1,700 votes. She was a 4 term congress woman. Trump won the district by 10% in 2016. All of a sudden 8,000 ballots appear - apparently absentee ballots that they had forgot to count. Once those were counted it swung the election by 2,726 votes in favor of the Un Democrat. That would mean that the breakdown of those absentee ballots were 6,263 to the Un Democrats and 1,737 to the Republicans. That's a 78% to 22% split - highly suspicious. As such the Republican candidate has not conceded the race until her officials are allowed to confirm these absentee ballots. Of course the Un Democrat Secretary of State is not authorizing that since the margin of the win was more than 1%.

Funny how all these additional ballots are popping up skewed heavily towards the Un Democrats. Something stinks in the system.
 
K

K Douglas

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azeri99 said:
I'm sorry photo ID should be mandatory to vote, if you can't get one piece of photo ID with all the options available, you should be deemed to stupid to vote.
Click to expand...
That is the Un Democrats idea of voter suppression. Actually proving who you are - like every other advanced country's voting system.
 
oldjones

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azeri99 said:
I'm sorry photo ID should be mandatory to vote, if you can't get one piece of photo ID with all the options available, you should be deemed to stupid to vote.
Click to expand...
I think if you look at the Florida regulations, you will find there's nothing any one would describe as " … all the options available", as if there were lots of them. If there were, how would the Official know that picture ID they'd never seen before really was the person registered as a voter?

What makes ID's dependable is that there are very few options and all of them are well-known and reliable. Unfortunately that also can make them a lot harder to get, than it is to know who you want as Senator, President or Mayor.

K Douglas said:
That is the Un Democrats idea of voter suppression. Actually proving who you are - like every other advanced country's voting system.
Click to expand...
Proving who you are requires a whole helluva lot of documentation, oaths, guarantors and such like efforts — NB: Originals or notarized copies only! Almost always what we're really doing is just proving a credible connection between our physical self and someone on some other reliable list of known persons. Like the Official List of Citizens of Legal Voting Age Residing in an Electoral District. Elections Canada keeps ours. Americans call theirs the List of Registered voters, and they actually register by Party. In either country, all the voter's doing is 'proving' they're the person named/registered on the list.

If you think the best election is one where the most voters vote, you match people to your list one way, and make it simple if you believe the best election is one where your guy wins, you match to the list rather differently.

Since we're discussing a country where candidates for elected office actually run their own elections, make the rules and keep the lists, I think there's little doubt their interest is in suppressing every vote but theirs. And all accounts and reports bear that out.

When the other Party takes over, they'll just switch black and white hats, as they always have.
 
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Charlemagne

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Rick Scott's monitors agree with state cops: No Florida voter fraud

By MATT DIXON 11/10/2018 01:32 PM EST

TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Rick Scott asked state law enforcement to investigate Broward County election officials because of potential “rampant [voter] fraud,” even though monitors from his own administration say they have seen none in that county.

“Our staff has seen no evidence of criminal activity at this time,” Department of State spokeswoman Sarah Revell wrote in an email on Saturday. Scott is the state’s current governor and the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate with a narrow lead over incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.)

That assessment, which was first reported by the Miami Herald, jives with that given by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which said Friday it has also seen no allegations of fraud.

Despite his own administration and state law enforcement saying there is no evidence of voter fraud, Scott held an event organized by his Senate campaign Thursday night to ask the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate Broward County and Palm Beach County, which are playing a big role in a recount involving his race against Nelson.

Those counties have drawn the ire of many Republicans, who have cried fraud because vote counts have increased by tens-of-thousands after Election Day. Because those are Democratic-leaning counties, the new votes have benefited Democratic candidates, narrowing leads held by Scott in the Senate race and Republican Ron DeSantis in the governor’s race. Some have suggested fraud might have caused the vote tallies to grow, but state law allows local election officials to count votes until noon on Saturday. A recount is set to begin Saturday.

The unprecedented Scott request amounts to a sitting governor asking state law enforcement to investigate local election officials involved in counting ballots for a race in which he is a candidate.

Additional Department of State staff were sent to Broward County after a federal judge found in May that the county’s Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes violated state and federal law by destroying ballots in Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultzs 2016 re-election bid. At that time, Scott, who has the authority to remove Snipes from office, said the state would be sending additional election monitors to Broward County for the 2018 election.

The department sent two staffers to Broward County starting Nov. 6. Revell, the DOS spokeswoman, not only said those monitors saw no signs of fraud on the ground, but have not yet produced any work product or report related to their observations.

“There are no reports from the observers,” Revell said.

The staffers on the ground, who Revell has not identified despite questions from POLITICO, were given a number of tasks and will be on the ground in Broward County until the election is certified, a process that could go on long after Election Day.

“Two staff members from the Division of Elections were assigned as observers to monitor the administration of the election, including visiting polling locations throughout the day as needed and observing preparation of the voting equipment and procedures for the election,” Revell said.

https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2018/11/10/scotts-own-monitors-agree-with-law-enforcement-no-signs-of-florida-voter-fraud-691112
 
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