Broward counts wrong ballots as cluster-funk continues

Fort Lauderdale, FL -- First they bungled the machine recount, now in Broward County's second day of manual recounting they vote counters had to stop about an hour into the start on Saturday when lawyers from both parties pointed out that volunteers had been counting the wrong ballots.

You simply cannot make this stuff up.

Hundreds of unpaid, unskilled, volunteers spent Friday going through 32,000 over-votes and undervotes in the Senate race between incumbent Sen. Bill "My- Face-Died-Last-Year" Nelson, and Republican Gov. Rick Scott.

On Friday night, Broward officials announced they had completed their manual recount.

Then on Saturday, volunteers began sorting about 22,000 undervotes and over-votes in the hotly run contest for Florida Commissioner of Agriculture.

But that came to a screeching halt when lawyers discovered thousands of overlapping ballots which clearly showed a vote in the agricultural race but were unclear in the Senate race. [Unclear, fuzzy ballots, are generally considered to be votes for Democrats, according to Democrats.]

"It appears there may have been some ballots from yesterday mixed in with the ones for today," Broward Canvassing Board Judge Deborah Carpenter-Toye told the media.

Mixed in from the Senate recount were forty-seven manila envelopes with envelopes distributed for the commissioner election.

According to Broward County Canvassing Board Attorney Rene Harrod, the mistake was caught in time and none of the 47 ballots made it to the canvassing board. Had this not been caught, it would be very possible that some votes would be counted twice.

Republican attorney Joseph Goldstein said the recount must be stopped but the canvassing board decided to continue the count and instructed the unskilled, unpaid, and poorly motivated volunteers to flag any incorrect ballots from Saturday's count.

This all comes as the state flounders around trying to complete its mandatory manual recount in the U.S. Senate race by noon Sunday. Florida, particularly Broward County, has been under heavy scrutiny since the recounts were ordered last Saturday. But this is what you get when you have an idiot in the position of Election Supervisor for Broward County.

Speaking of the Election Supervisor, Brenda Snipes, she bragged about making the state's deadline for machine results, something that's actually part of her job and nothing to brag about. It's like a Parking Meter Enforcement Agent bragging about ticketing a car for an expired meter.

"We are excited to be at this point," Snipes said Thursday.

The election brain trust

Then a mere few hours later, election officials had to admit the county had uploaded the results past the deadline by two minutes [after the 3 p.m. cutoff]. So the machine recount tally was void. It's possible this was done intentionally by Snipes since it was clear that Scott was kicking butt in the results.

So Broward's results from Election Night stands until manual recount totals come in by Sunday at noon.

Hillsborough County intentionally refused to report its tally, which would have awarded Scott about 150 votes, because the recount turned up 846 fewer votes than the county's initial tally, proving once again, that elections in Florida are about as accurate as Stevie Wonder's skeet shooting.

Palm Beach election supervisor Susan Bucher said the county found "dozens of precincts missing a significant number" of votes during the machine recount and said there were entire boxes of ballots that weren't counted.

Bill Nelson

Bucher also blamed the problems on mechanical errors and said the scanning machines overheated. She flew in two technicians to fix the problem but they witnessed Palm Beach County workers jam a paper clip into the scanner's "enter" button to slow the high-speed scanner down. This caused a short-circuit that cut off the power, according to The New York Times.

And you wonder why we don't trust Democrats?

As it stands, Bill Nelson is finished as a mediocre senator and Rick Scott will now take his seat. Ron DeSantis will be governor and Andrew Gillum will remain a leftist sore loser.


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