"Get it Right on Election Night!"
Elect Ellen Harriet Brodsky Non-Partisan Candidate for Supervisor of Elections, Broward County.
Dear Broward Voters,
It is time for a change in our election administration.
I am Ellen Harriet Brodsky, and I am running as Broward’s first Non-Partisan Candidate for Supervisor of Elections. It should be common sense that, for a fair election, those running the system should not be influenced by partisan issues. But in Broward County, that is not the case.
I am running as a Non-Partisan candidate to restore integrity to Broward's electoral system. My fiduciary duty is to you the voters, not lobbyists, politicians, vendors or party bosses.
The incumbent, Brenda Snipes was appointed to her office to replace the previous grossly incompetent Supervisor, Miriam Oliphant. But, under Snipes, the poor management of Broward's elections has continued. She has won reelection by exploiting her name recognition to win votes from citizens who are not well informed about the problems with our electoral system. She has been using your tax money to put her name and face everywhere - inside the polling locations, in your mail, on billboards and even on your sample ballot.
My campaign is about ending the exploitation of Broward's voters and instead educating them about our electoral system and how to repair it. All of us, as citizens, have the right to have our votes counted accurately.
"Vote with Confidence"
Snipes’ motto is “Vote with Confidence.” But confidence in our election system can only come from scientific, documented evidence that our votes are counted accurately.
During the last election, 54 precinct memory cards failed to be read. And in the post-election audit, according to Snipes, only 9 out of 16 precincts matched the machine results with real paper ballots, with unacceptable inaccuracy at a majority of the precincts reviewed.
When I was asked to review the Congressional District 21 race in 2006, I made a public records request for the audit data and ballot image logs from our election. For almost two years I was denied access to these records. First I was told by Snipes they were not election records and therefore not her responsibility. Then I was told that it was too much work to create them or that they did not exist. I later learned from the Florida Fair Elections Coalition that in 2007 our Supervisor had a catastrophic computer crash, and lost our election records.
How can we “Vote with Confidence” when appointed election observers are illegally barred from viewing manual recounts? As your Supervisor of Elections I will make sure you can "Vote with Confidence" by producing the test results to back it up. And I will not stand for flagrant disregard of our legal rights. Citizens of Broward County have the right to be present, to hear, see and address how our voting system works. The administration under Snipes has been hiding their incompetance for years, and as a result Broward's voters are paying the price.
Elections Owned by the Voters
The Snipes administration has signed No-bid contracts with a privately-owned company, ES&S, to supply our voting machines. There were no public hearings surrounding this important decision, and requests for an unbiased representative body of citizens to advise on voting system selection were quickly shot down. Effectively, our elections have been turned over to private corporations who are not accountable to the public. In the contract signed by Snipes and county administrators there are no performance benchmarks or merchantability clauses to make sure the vendor ensures that our votes will even be counted accurately. As your Supervisor of Elections I will only support voting systems that are transparent and open to public scrutiny.
"Part of the Process"
I have been fighting for an accurate and accountable election system in Broward since 2001. Most notably, in 2007 I helped mobilize thousands of Floridians to de-certify the notoriously buggy and unverifiable touchscreen voting machines. The current Supervisor of Elections has been a staunch supporter of the touchscreens, blaming voters and pollworkers for irregularities instead of taking responsibility to change the system. She now says that machine malfunction is just “part of the process.”
In 2004 and 2006, Broward had the highest number of incident reports out of all voting methods in the United States, and the highest number of undervotes and rejected provisional ballots.
In the January Primary our Supervisor certified an election with a 110% voter turnout in precinct D001. There was clearly a malfunction in the system, but Snipes said there was nothing she could do. Since 2001 there have been numerous reports of our voting machines counting backwards, and in 2004 there was between 58,000 to 76,000 missing absentee ballots. Still no one has been held accountable. Is this "Part of the Process"? As your Supervisor of Elections I will refuse to certify any election that I cannot prove is accurate, and take responsibility to immediately investigate errors within the system.