From Miami Herald
Broward’s elections supervisor accidentally mixed more than a dozen rejected ballots with nearly 200 valid ones, a circumstance that is unlikely to help Brenda Snipes push back against Republican allegations of incompetence.
The mistake — for which no one had a solution Friday night — was discovered after Snipes agreed to present 205 provisional ballots to the Broward County canvassing board for inspection. She had initially intended to handle the ballots administratively but agreed to present them to the canvassing board after Republican attorneys objected.
Broward had about 600 provisional ballots from Election day which were invalid for a variety of reasons. But about 250 were valid. Because of a connectivity problem when initially checking their registration it showed they weren’t registered but they actually were. But now because Snipes separated them from the original signed envelopes, there’s now no way of determining which were the invalid ballots that she mixed in with the valid.
On Friday, the three-person canvassing board — on which Snipes usually sits — found about 20 of those 205 votes had mismatched signatures and declared them illegal. That means there are at least 20 illegal votes mixed into an anonymous pile of 205, all sitting in a machine that counted them but did not add them to the final count.“The ballots cannot be identified,” Snipes confirmed when a lawyer for the Republican Party asked.
“This process doesn’t exist. The process is that the ballots aren’t opened. I would suggest to the board that this process would stop,” said Leonard Collins, a lawyer for the Florida Republican Party.
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