We are now three days beyond the election, and votes have yet to be counted in Broward County, Fla. Election officials in the South Florida county are still discovering and still counting ballots that could determine who becomes governor and who the state sends to the Senate. They won’t say how many votes are left, even though the law requires it.
But there is little reason for confidence in the outcomes, because Broward has long been a national disgrace. Voting is the hallmark of democracy, and Broward, because of the way it has practiced elections for the last two decades, is the picture of incompetence.
[Trump: I am sending lawyers to Florida to ‘expose the fraud’]
This Florida story starts with hanging chads and butterfly ballots and a Supreme Court ruling stopping a recount and ending the presidential election between then-Texas Governor George W. Bush and then-Vice President Al Gore. Heavily Democratic then, as it is now, Broward was 1 of 4 counties where the Gore campaign requested a hand recount of disputed ballots.
The iconic picture of Judge Robert Rosenberg intently studying a punch-card ballot through a magnifying glass defined the fiasco. It unsurprisingly came from Broward. This mess would continue for more than a month, until the Supreme Court mercifully ended it with its decision in Bush v. Gore.
And that episode, which plagued more than just Broward, seems tame compared to what kept coming next. Miriam Oliphant, the City Link paper would note at the time, was “a rising political star” when she was elected Broward County Supervisor of Elections in 2001. Two years later, Oliphant would be walked off of government property by sheriff’s deputies.
Oliphant looked like a reformer at first, the kind of elected official needed to save Broward from more national humiliation. She cleaned house firing staff and setting new standards. Then, she ran over budget by almost a million dollars, placed cronies in key positions, and even hired Glen Davis, a perpetually drunk homeless man, to work the mailroom ahead of the 2002 primaries.
“Davis was the guy,” Art Levine of City Link wrote, “who didn’t open and time-stamp nearly 300 absentee ballots amid a crush of mail related to the September 2002 election; the ballots were later found buried in a filing cabinet. Considered too unsteady to drive to the post office and often absent, he was occasionally reprimanded but never fired.”
Davis could not be fired, a government employee later explained during legal deposition, because of his friendship with Oliphant. He was considered “untouchable.”
Oliphant’s overspending eventually had a direct effect on the election and ended her career. During the 2003 municipal elections, Broward didn’t have enough money to pay poll workers or update voter rolls. The result? As the Sun Sentinel reported at the time, the U.S. Postal Service returned 17,245 of the 100,000 ballots mailed out because they went to the wrong addresses.
“We’ve been saying it for a long time that the rolls need to be cleaned up, but no one has been listening,” County Commissioner Lori Parrish said of Oliphant. “When it comes to this supervisor, I have no faith in what happens.”
Then-Gov. Jeb Bush agreed and suspended Oliphant shortly afterward for “grave neglect, mismanagement and incompetence.” The Republican appointed Brenda Snipes to become a county supervisor who would clean up Broward.
That didn’t work.
The next disaster came during the 2004 presidential election, and all to the detriment of the Democratic candidate, Sen. John Kerry. Snipes botched the election worse than her predecessor, reporting that 58,000 absentees ballots had been lost in the mail. She later lowered that number to 6,000.
To fix her own mistake, Snipes had 5,600 replacement absentee ballots mailed ahead of the election. As the Washington Post reported at the time, the ballots were dropped off late Saturday evening. According to a spokesman for the Postal Service, by that time, the mail carriers were gone.
“There’s no way in hell those people are going to get their ballots in a timely fashion,” Gerry McKiernan, the spokesman, told the Post. “They should get their act together over there.”
With Snipes in charge, they never did. In fact, the election supervisor ended up in court for illegally destroying ballots in the 2016 race between Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her primary challenger, Tim Canova. State law requires the elections office to preserve ballots in a federal election for 22 months. Snipes destroyed the paper ballots after 12 months while, as the Sun Sentinel notes, they “were still the subject of a pending lawsuit.”
Dodging responsibility in court this May, Snipes appeared to blame her staff. “When I sign, I sign folders filled with information,” Snipes said during testimony, later adding, as the Sun Sentinel reported at the time: “I trust my staff. They have the responsibility of giving me information that’s correct.”
Now Broward finds itself in the middle of another controversy, with either a hapless or corrupt elections supervisor at the wheel. They find themselves in exactly the situation the editorial board of the Sun Sentinel predicted in June when they editorialized that Snipes credibility was “past the tipping point” and called on her not to seek another term.
Snipes didn’t listen, and now Snipes won’t say how long it will take her to count the remaining ballots in the current races. She won’t even say how many ballots there are left to be counted, even though it is her regulatory obligation. The result is embarrassingly Kafkaesque. Again and again, local reporters shout questions. Again and again, Snipes demurs. She says she is too busy. She says she is going “to take a break.”
Meanwhile, Broward County remains a perennial disgrace.
