Multiple shortcomings contributed to a problem-plagued 2018 election in Broward County, many of which were on public display while a national cable TV audience waited for Florida to recount votes in elections for governor and U.S. Senate. A controversial audit 18 months later is now detailing even more failings.
Among the issues raised in the audit:
Half of Broward County’s election precincts reported more ballots cast than the number of voters. Backlogs in processing mail ballots snarled reporting of results.
Confusing ballot design may have led thousands of voters to inadvertently skip an important contest.
Money was wasted on unneeded blank ballots, which weren’t adequately tracked and were eventually destroyed.
After election day, auditors found the recount was plagued by poor planning, inadequate staffing and equipment, and poor quality control.
Confidence
The findings led to a troubling conclusion from Broward County Auditor Bob Melton, whose office examined what went wrong in 2018.
“We conclude that the November 2018 election was not efficiently and effectively conducted,” Melton wrote in to county commissioners. “Based on the totality of these issues, we are unable to provide assurance over the accuracy of the November 2018 election results as reported.”
Several of Melton’s findings could raise concerns among voters about whether their wishes will be accurately counted in the 2020 presidential election, might heighten interest in this year’s election in which voters will choose a new supervisor of elections, and may provide fodder for political forces that want to undermine confidence in voting.
County Commissioner Steve Geller said Friday that there is no doubt that “the last election had problems. … I’m not defending the last election.” But, he said, the draft audit was “written in language that was alarmist.”
The official who ran the Elections Office leading up to and through the 2018 election and recount was then-Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes. She left office shortly after the election.
Peter Antonacci, who was appointed to fill the job, agreed with most of the individual audit findings — but not Melton’s sweeping, overall conclusion.
“It goes without saying that November 2018 election night was chaotic so there’s to be no quibbling over charts, the data or their informed interpretation,” Antonacci wrote in a response to the audit.
But, he added, the issues detailed by Melton’s team “do not change the outcome of any race.”
Mitch Ceasar, a former chairman of the Broward Democratic Party who interacted with three different supervisors of elections during his 20 years in the post, said elections are far more complex than most people realize. “Sometimes it becomes a game of political whack-a-mole. You fix one problem and then another problem crops up,” he said.
Ceasar is one of several candidates running to succeed Antonacci.
Issues
Extra votes: Auditors said a little more than half of the county’s voting precincts — 293 out of 577 — had a combined total of 885 more tabulated votes than voters. Though that’s miniscule compared to the total voter turnout of 715,519, and a different set of countywide records showed no extra ballots, the auditors wrote that is the kind of problem that “compromises voter confidence.”
Tabulating mail ballots: State law allows elections staffers to open and scan mail ballots before Election Day, but the results are locked away in tabulation equipment until the polls close. But in 2018, the staff didn’t keep up with vote-by-mail ballots received before Election Day, a backlog that put the office way behind.
By the time the polls closed on election night, 121,599 mail ballots were received and tabulated. But 49,861 vote-by-mail ballots weren’t tabulated by the time workers went home the night before the election. Another 18,116 came in on Election Day. As a result, there were 69,902 mail ballots that needed tabulation when the polls closed at 7 p.m. It took days to finish, resulting in “untimely reporting of election results, and compromised voter confidence.”
Missing ballots: As was widely known at the time, 2,335 ballots went missing during the recount. As ballot pages that needed to be recounted for the close statewide races were separated from pages that didn’t need to be counted again, some pages with statewide races went into the wrong box. “Staff became aware of the issue during the recount and attempted, but were unable, to locate the misplaced pages in a timely manner,” the audit found.
Faulty ballot design: Broward County placed federal races in the lower left-hand corner of the ballot, underneath ballot instructions in English, Spanish and Creole. Tucked away in the bottom left, many people apparently missed the U.S. Senate race. In other counties, instructions were printed across the top of the page, which placed the Senate contest at the top where it was impossible to miss.
Antonacci declined to comment on the audit. But in his written responses, and in previous interviews and public comments, he said he fixed many of the problems before the March 2020 presidential primary, and is implementing more changes.
For example, the office is cross-training employees to handle multiple functions, buying more ballot processing equipment, and having more than one shift of people work on mail-ballot tabulation. State election law was changed last year to prevent use of the problematic ballot design.
Spending
The auditors also identified several issues related to the budget and spending.
Supplies: The budget estimated supplies would be ordered based on an estimated 60% voter turnout, with 50% voting on Election Day. But the actual order assumed a 76% turnout, with 100% voting on Election Day. The auditors said that led to $793,372 in “unnecessary waste” because far too many ballots were ordered and not needed.
Over budget: The November 2018 election ran about 14% over budget, which amounts to $1.3 million. “Inadequate planning and staffing resulted in avoidable costs” including $1 million in unbudgeted overtime and $180,000 more to vendors because of the recount.
Controversy
The draft audit is dated April 22, and county commissioners discussed it, briefly, at their May 5 meeting. It’s back in Melton’s hands after some commissioners objected to proposed policy changes and legal analyses that came from the auditor.
Geller and Commissioner Beam Furr said Friday that Melton want far afield from examining issues directly connected to what happened in the 2018 election. “I have no idea what political party he is and what news channel he watches,” Geller said. “It appeared to me that the auditor was delivering what I would expect to see on Fox News or OANN.”
Some of the issues Melton went into — such as voter registration — are part of intense, national political fights that are seen by many as attempts to suppress the votes of some groups.
“I count on him to make sure that we’ve got sound fiscal policies and that money is being spent in the way it’s supposed to be spent,” Furr said. “I thought he was delving into policy issues.”
Melton said audits aren’t influenced by political considerations. “Our audits present control deficiencies or weaknesses. It doesn’t make any difference to us the position of any political party on the issue. A control weakness is a control weakness,” he said.
The most politically explosive conclusion was Melton’s statement that state law doesn’t provide “adequate controls over preventing ineligible non-citizens from registering to vote.” That wasn’t a problem created by the Broward County office, auditors said, and one that can’t be changed locally.
The auditors said the elections office provided a list of 18 non-citizens on the voter rolls. More than 1.2 million people are registered to vote in the county. The audit didn’t find evidence of fraud in connection with the non-citizens.
The auditors raised concerns about homeless voters — 299 registered voters whose address was listed as the Broward County Governmental Center in Fort Lauderdale and eight whose address was Pembroke Pines Fire-Rescue — and were troubled by the addresses of some Nova Southeastern University students that listed an address but not a specific unit number.
Though the auditors objected to those practices, they’re established by court decisions and state law.
Melton said he hopes to have an updated version of the audit to the commission in June.
“The issues presented in the report in some instances are fairly complicated. And once the commissioners and others received it, it was apparent to me that things were being inferred from the body of the report that we did not intend to imply,” Melton said.
He said the new version would clarify “any extraneous information in there that would cause people to potentially be sidetracked from the main issues in the report.”
Snipes announced her resignation after the end of the 2018 recount, to take effect after then-Gov. Rick Scott left office. Scott then removed her and installed Antonacci.
Snipes declined to comment on the audit on Friday. She said she didn’t have documentation to go through specific issues raised.
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com or on Twitter @browardpolitics
