Were Franz Kafka alive, and an American, he would find his muse in a certain municipal functionary from Florida. Her name is Brenda Snipes, and she is the nightmarishly incompetent, bizarre, and wholly illogical supervisor of elections in Broward County.

Snipes became the subject of the nightly news because she couldn’t do what all 65 other election supervisors could. She couldn’t follow the rules and count votes by the book.