Broward County Recount Results Tossed For Being Filed Late By Two Minutes

Broward County continues to struggle with the most basic demands of being a functioning democratic system.  In fairness to Florida, all but a couple counties showed that they are prepared for democracy.  However, Broward (which has been accused of mismanagement for years) fulfilled the worst expectations by filing its recount results two minutes late.  It might have been two days for all that it matters. That is the problem with legal deadlines. There are generally no mulligans.  Broward released an announcement that none of its recount would count.  Despite the defense of Brenda Snipes by Democratic leaders like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the latest failure of her office removes any question about the level of mismanagement of the county (as well as those responsible for Palm Beach and Hillsborough counties).  Snipes recently boasted that she never missed deadlines. To miss a deadline by minutes just shows a complete lack of supervisory competence.

Joseph D’Alessandro, Broward County’s election planning and development director simply said “Basically, I just worked my ass off for nothing.”  He explained that they just weren’t familiar with the website and had trouble uploading the results. Really?  How about having someone confirming the steps in advance and starting a tad earlier?

D’Alessandro simply said that “We uploaded to the state two minutes late so the state has chosen not to use our machine recount results.  They are going to use our first unofficial results as our second unofficial results.”

So we have spent hundreds of millions in state support and Florida has spent millions since the debacle of the Bush-Gore election . . . and so little seems to have changed in the Florida counties.

Making this all the more controversial, GOP candidate Rick Scott’s campaign has accused Snipes of intentionally missing the deadline to invalidate a count that favored his campaign.