Brenda Snipes is gone. Good riddance. But more needs to be done. If Florida has learned anything from the last two decades of national humiliation, it knows that a single personnel shift won’t solve the problem.
Snipes resigned as Broward County supervisor of elections on Sunday rather than face the inevitable and humiliating removal by either outgoing Gov. Rick Scott or incoming Gov. Ron DeSantis. She was awful, and she has been awful for a long time.
The vote counter lost absentees ballots — as many as 6,000—ahead of the 2004 presidential race. She illegally destroyed ballots that were the subject of pending litigation in 2016. She mixed bad ballots in with good in the latest 2018 midterm elections. Add on top of that a willful disregard for state law and a total aversion to transparency, and she shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a polling place ever again.
Exiling Snipes isn’t enough though. There is a good case to be made that the troubles of Broward County are systemic. Just look at her predecessor, Miriam Oliphant.
Oliphant made Snipes look decent by comparison because if Snipes was incompetent, Oliphant was nearly criminally negligent. She spent millions the office didn’t have. She installed cronies in plum positions. She even hired a perpetually drunk homeless man who later hid 300 absentee ballots in a filing cabinet rather than count them. Then-Gov. Jeb Bush had her removed from office and marched off government property by sheriff’s deputies in 2003.
The problems persisted thanks to Snipes, and elections never held her accountable. Snipes was re-elected four different times. Maybe that is because voters don’t get into the minutiae of electoral procedure before walking into their polling place. We would like to think the electorate is informed. More often than not, it isn’t. So to preserve democracy, make the elections division less democratic.
If Florida gave blue ribbons to the county that did the best job counting ballots and following the law, the prize would go to Miami-Dade County just south of Broward. The two are different in two ways. First, as the most populous county in the state, Miami-Dade had a harder job. Second, Miami-Dade doesn’t elect its election supervisors.
The mayor of Miami appoints the election supervisor, and the county commission votes to confirm the choice. This way an applicant is judged by their competence, not their partisan stock. The electorate still has a say in the process, of course. Their vote for mayor and county commission just carries more weight now that they are empowering others to make a more informed decision.
If something goes wrong, if the mayor and the county commission appoint a bad apple, they bear the responsibility. In Miami-Dade, they deserve the credit. Not only did the supervisor of elections turn in voter tallies on time on Election Day, the office obtained special permission to begin the recount early. While Broward crashed and burned, Miami-Dade was a well-oiled machine.
More counties should switch to appointed election supervisors. Sadly, the state’s voters just passed a constitutional amendment requiring this post to be elected. Floridians should reverse that vote, and counties should make vote counting a matter for experts.
