The Florida county at the epicenter of voting fraud allegations plaguing the tight senatorial race between incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Republican Gov. Rick Scott has a history of gross election board mismanagement. The incompetence has led to elections marked by dead people on voter rolls plus illegal aliens and ineligible convicted felons casting votes.
The problems in Broward County, the second-most populous area in Florida after Miami-Dade County, date back to just after the infamous 2000 presidential election race between George W. Bush and Al Gore, which was decided after a long-drawn-out legal battle over votes in Florida.
History of Ineptitude
In Jan. 2001, Miriam Oliphant took office as Supervisor of Elections in Broward County. She was billed as a reformer following the embarrassing chaos of the Bush-Gore fiasco in Florida. Oliphant immediately fired veteran staffers and replaced them with handpicked cronies, Florida magazine City Link reported. She lavished generous salaries on these staffers, soared over budget, and proceeded to oversee a shockingly incompetent operation that botched the 2002 state elections to such a degree that she was fired by then-Governor Jeb Bush.
Among other bizarre personnel moves, Oliphant hired a homeless man to work in the mailroom and later gave him a $5,000 raise. The homeless man was a friend of Oliphant’s sister whom she met while living in a homeless shelter herself. Other employees were hired haphazardly and given important positions with the elections office, including supervisory roles. “Many times, people would show up at the office on a Monday or a Tuesday and just tell me that Mrs. Oliphant had met them over the weekend and that they were here for a job,” said Joe Cotter, a former deputy for the office. “They were severely lacking in qualifications for the positions they were put in.”
Oliphant’s own political mentor, Broward County Public Defender Alan Schreiber, questioned her sanity, saying, “I always thought she was very stable, but I think she had pre-existing psychiatric conditions, and the power was the catalyst that pushed her over the edge.”
When Bush fired Oliphant in Nov. 2003, he was worried about taking political flak for dismissing the only countywide black Democrat official, the Sun-Sentinel reports. So he replaced her with Brenda Snipes, another black Democrat, to stem any politically correct criticism.
Since being appointed by Bush, Snipes has repeatedly been re-elected in heavily Democrat Broward County, and the Supervisor of Elections office has continued the reign of error that began under her predecessor.
J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an organization that filed a federal lawsuit against Snipes’ office, told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he asked Snipes in court:
“How many changes did you make to the personnel of Miriam Oliphant, the woman who was removed for incompetence? How many people did you replace? Guess what the answer was? Nobody. She kept everybody there. All the people who were screwing it up 15 years ago are still screwing it up today.”
How It Helps Dems
Accounts of gross mismanagement at the Supervisor of Elections office have been widely reported, but of grave concern to those who value fair elections is how Snipes’ “incompetence” can directly lead to increased Democrat vote totals.[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=”24″]One way to get the rolls artificially high is to keep the dead registered.[/perfectpullquote]
In 2012, the Florida Secretary of State found that 53,000 dead people were registered to vote in the state. One of the key points in the federal lawsuit filed against Snipes’ election office is the unreasonably high voter registration records in Broward County. One way to get the rolls artificially high is to keep the dead registered.
“Snipes said she does not use Social Security death records to check up on extremely old voters – like age 130. She waits for a death certificate to fall in her lap. She won’t even look at local obituaries as a starting point,” Logan Churchwell of the Public Interest Legal Foundation told The Daily Signal.
This is how you can “find” new ballots after the election has taken place. With voter rolls artificially high, you can create ballots out of thin air and still not exceed the voter registration count. Nearly 80,000 new ballots have been discovered in Broward County since Election Night. To no one’s surprise, they are steadily chipping away at Republican Rick Scott’s lead over Democrat Nelson.
The Sun-Sentinel reported that Snipes also admitted in court, “the processes her office [has] been using aren’t perfect and that some noncitizens and felons have voted despite not being eligible – especially right before major elections, when groups are actively registering new voters.” So she is admitting that her office cannot adequately check fraud in a state that requires voter ID.
When so-called incompetence ends up directly benefitting one political party, can we really chalk it all up to poor management? Or is the state of chaos resulting from all this malfeasance exactly what Democrats in Broward County and the state of Florida want?
There is no reason to believe the party that values and promotes the brazen flouting of our nation’s immigration laws would suddenly have reverence for another set of our laws. Democrats are the party of crime when it comes to immigration. Why wouldn’t they be the same when it comes to voting?
