Now that the Broward County election officials have delayed their reporting of ballots for almost two days after the election, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has been furiously denouncing them on Twitter, writing that they are trying to steal victories from GOP candidates who won in the state.
Rubio started by noting that Bay County in Florida was hit by a category 4 hurricane roughly a month ago, yet still gave timely results after Tuesday’s election:
Then Rubio noted the seeming malfeasance of the Broward County supervisor:
Next, he pointed out that the Broward elections department has a history of violating the law:
As Politico reported last August:
A judge has ordered the election supervisor in Florida’s second-most populous county to change the way she handles vote-by-mail absentee ballots after the Republican Party sued her for not following the law. The declaratory injunction, ordered Friday, prevents Broward County Election Supervisor Brenda Snipes from opening the mail-in ballots in secret or before the county’s three-member Canvassing Board meets to determine the ballots’ validity. The board can begin meeting Monday to handle absentee ballots, more than 75,000 of which have been cast in Broward ahead of the Aug. 28 primaries …
Under state law, an elector or campaign can challenge the lawfulness of an absentee ballot, but only before the ballot has been opened from its mail-in envelope. By opening the ballot before it got to the three-member Canvassing Board, the Republican Party complained, Snipes’ office was breaking the law and making any challenge impossible.
Rubio followed with his accusation that lawyers sympathetic to the Democratic Party had come to Florida to ensure the theft of GOP victories:
Rubio pointed out the elections supervisor had a history of incompetence:
Here’s some information from the article in the Miami Herald that Rubio cited. A court ruling last May found that Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes had illegally destroyed ballots from a 2016 congressional race. Consequently, the Florida Department of State planned to send election experts to Snipes’ office for the November election “to ensure that all laws are followed” and “to observe the administration of the election.”
Furthermore, in 2016, Broward County violated election law by posting early voting results before the polls closed.
The Herald noted, “On multiple occasions, there have been problems with printing mail ballots. And in the August primaries, Broward was the last county to post election results. The department cited reasons from unexpected recounts, delayed jump drive delivery — rumor was they were temporarily lost — to a late influx of mail-in ballots that were still being counted the next day, leaving the results of several races unclear.”
Snipes said, “It is a process. It takes as much time as it takes.”
Rubio pointed out that the election supervisors were providing an opportunity for lawyers to steal GOP victories:
Then, Rubio noted how the devious the Broward County and Palm Beach officials were:
Rubio noted how the Democrats were peeling away the victory of Rick Scott in the senator’s race in which he defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson: