Recent press reports indicated that Brenda Snipes submitted her resignation from her position as Broward County Supervisor of Elections. The news does little to ameliorate the devastating corruption riddling Broward County politics. In the eyes of many observers, Snipes and her associates should rightfully be serving prison sentences for repeated election rigging that became colloquially known as the ‘Brenda Snipes Process.’
Shortly after the news was announced, Tim Canova called for the resignation of Snipes’s Director, Dozel Spencer. Likewise, many point out that Brenda Snipes is simply the public face of a deeply corrupt political system, and without real change, business will most likely continue as usual in the Southern Florida county. In this writer’s opinion, two steps are as necessary as they are unlikely to be implemented: invalidation of the congressional race in the 23rd Congressional district, and prosecution of those involved in election rigging, including Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
As readers may recall, Brenda Snipes and former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz have been responsible for multiple instances actual election interference and actual data breaches that may have benefitted foreign interests. While the entire beltway establishment collectively lost its mind over fictitious allegations of Russian hacking and election interference, the real culprits have escaped both punishment and press scrutiny.
It was Wasserman-Schultz who infamously worked to tip the scale in favor of Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 Democratic Primary. She is the only defendant named personally in the ongoing DNC Fraud lawsuit, in which lawyers for the defense infamously argued that the DNC has the right to favor one primary candidate over another, later claiming that such practice is protected by the first amendment, despite the fact that it runs contrary to the party’s charter.
Shortly before this year’s midterms, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice announced it would not prosecute the Awan scandal, in which Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was also personally embroiled. Disobedient Media’s Kenneth Whittle reported on concerns that the Awan brothers may have passed sensitive material stolen from Congress members to countries including Israel, Saudi Arabia, and China via Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI.
Disobedient Media also previously noted that Wasserman-Schultz was photographed campaigning with Snipes in the weeks leading up to the midterm elections.
It was Brenda Snipes who illegally destroyed ballots from the 2016 Democratic Primary race between Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Tim Canova. Very few legacy press outlets have addressed this history of corruption, an appalling omission that severely distorts the context in which the latest midterm debacle has taken place.
The Sun Sentinel explained Snipes’s prior history of illegal ballot destruction:
“[Tim] Canova, who was checking for voting irregularities in the [2016 Primary] race, sought to look at the paper ballots in March 2017 and took Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes to court three months later when her office hadn’t fulfilled his request. Snipes approved the destruction of the ballots in September, signing a certification that said no court cases involving the ballots were pending. Snipes called the action a “mistake” during testimony she gave in the case, saying the boxes were mislabeled and there was “nothing on my part that was intentional” about destroying the contested ballots.”
Again, this context provides grounds for the call to invalidate the congressional race in Florida’s 23rd district, whose results were mind-bogglingly skewed from the results of a Republican poll that found Wasserman-Schultz and Tim Canova were neck-and-neck in the days leading up to this year’s midterm election.
On election night, the official vote count awarded a mere 5% of votes to Canova, prompting vocal calls for invalidation of that race. Given Snipes’s history of illegal ballot destruction and the fact that she was photographed campaigning with Wasserman-Schultz days before voters went to the polls, it would be ludicrous not to question the validity of the patently absurd results.
Tim Canova summarized this sentiment via Twitter:
I’m not opposed to any statewide recounts in FL. But that’s for statewide candidates to pursue. I’m for invalidating Broward elections & revoting with hand counted paper ballots. My race is centered in Broward, where I have standing & we’re battling DWS-Brenda Snipes corruption.
— Tim Canova (@Tim_Canova) November 16, 2018
Canova also wrote: “Brenda Snipes‘ crime spree continues! Canvassing Board ordered her to preserve all records, but only after it was revealed that Snipes again destroyed digital ballot images, again In violation of state & federal law and specific Dept of State directives!”
On election night, independent journalist and activist Niko House published a video purported to show ballots being improperly transported. The clip then went viral, raising furor across the country.
Caught On Video: Concerned citizen sees ballots being transported in private vehicles & transferred to rented truck on Election night. This violates all chain of custody requirements for paper ballots. Were the ballots destroyed & replaced by set of fake ballots? Investigate now! pic.twitter.com/GUPZnz7Gny
— Tim Canova (@Tim_Canova) November 8, 2018
House described what he and others witnessed in Broward County on election night, speaking to Lee Camp on RT’s Redacted Tonight. In addition to the irregularities described by House, numerous Press reports since the midterms have indicated that thousands of votes were discovered after election day.
According to a report by the New York Post, a teacher stumbled on a box of provisional ballots left in her Broward County classroom: “I went into the area that we use for storage and saw it in there,” Williams told The Post. Williams said she did not touch or look inside the box. Instead, she told the school’s principal and they decided to contact a local state representative. “I don’t know where it is now,” Williams said, noting that all provisional ballots needed to be received by county officials before 5 p.m. Thursday.”
Adding to the sense that the midterm debacle could have been the plot of a low-budget sitcom, the Daily Mailreported Snipes’s claim that 2,040 ballots had been ‘misfiled,’ while insisting they were somewhere in the building.
It’s not just the chaos of lost and found votes that throws the midterm results into the air: it is the likelihood that a significant number of the votes may have been illegitimate in the first place. As Tim Canova and others have pointed out, there is every possibility that the voting machines used in Broward County may have been tampered with to such an extent that there would be no way to tell whether a vote had been falsified or not.
After all, it was a replica of a Florida polling site that was successfully hacked by an 11-year-old earlier this year.
Public concerns regarding the legitimacy of votes submitted in Florida were further fueled by a report published by Who What Why, which included video evidence of a “digital scanner voting machine sending results wirelessly… This wireless link is at the heart of concerns that election results could be hacked or manipulated, “including attacks that could change vote totals and election results,” said Emily Levy, director of communications at the voting transparency group AUDIT-USA.”
Some have actually accused Snipes and her affiliates of falsifying ballots ‘as needed,’ dubbing the practice the ‘Brenda Snipes Process,’ which was allegedly used routinely in order to ensure a desired election outcome. If such accusations prove to have merit, it could explain a photograph taken on the day of voting, where a woman was reported to have identified herself as working for the elections department, asking if the polling site had enough ‘literature’ for Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Election Day Corruption: After Wasserman Schultz campaigns with disgraced Election Supervisor, this woman arrives to polling site, identifies herself as working for the Elections Department and asks if they have enough literature for Wasserman Schultz. We’ve called our lawyers. pic.twitter.com/J3SVLjzK5G
— Tim Canova (@Tim_Canova) November 6, 2018
With this context in mind, the “literature” in question being delivered to polling sites may not have been political advertising, so much as a delivery of falsified ballots. It is this writer’s opinion that these irregularities, as well as those noted by witnesses and volunteers on election day, must be fully addressed and the results of the vote invalidated in light of a level of incompetence that verges on the public, shameless rigging of the election.
It was not only Tim Canova and his supporters who protested the results of the congressional race in Florida’s 23rd district and called for a revote. In the wake of the election debacle, principal of the Lerman Law Firm in Florida, Cathy Lerman, announced that the firm would expand its investigation of electoral corruption in Broward County, citing dozens of specific examples of abuse.
Lerman also spoke with Fox News, saying: “The entire voting process in Broward is corrupt. We need to remove everyone from SOE and replace them with competent, honest representatives and then we need to do a re-vote of the August and November elections.”
Adding her voice to the chorus was Lulu Friesdat, an award-winning journalist, also wrote in an article published with Truthout: “Truthout did a preliminary analysis of the data that is currently available in the November 6 general election in Broward County… We found a vast array of irregularities in the Broward County results.”
Crucially, Friesdat stated: “In the results of Canova’s 2016 run against Wasserman Schultz, we found an over 1,000-vote discrepancy between the number of voters and the number of cast ballots. Out of 211 precincts, only 19 had the same number of voters as cast ballots. Election experts I spoke with were stunned, saying the results indicated either gross negligence or fraud.”
Ultimately, we are left with the unsettling reality that Brenda Snipes, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and others who actually have engaged in documented election interference on numerous occasions will never be appropriately punished.
Unfortunately, we will most likely never see the race between Canova and Wasserman-Schultz invalidated or a re-vote instituted, no matter how obvious the election fraud undergirding the results may be. The resignation of Brenda Snipes removes one face of corruption from the field but does nothing to address the systemic underpinnings that allowed such overtly intentional election rigging to occur in the first place.