Given the current election antics in Florida, this should come as no surprise: A retired Army Colonel claims that Broward County stole his vote, and the infamous Brenda Snipes “helped cover it up.”
Colonel Dave Lowry writes in the Washington Examiner that he had to vote by absentee ballot in the 2000 Bush v. Gore election. Because he was up against the deadline, Lowry decided to send his ballot in through UPS.
He tracked the package and was relieved to see that it arrived at 3:09 p.m. on Tuesday, November 7, 2000 and was signed by someone named “Benson”. The deadline was 7 p.m.
Seven months later, Lowry was contacted by a New York Times reporter who informed him his name was on a list of thousands of absentee ballots that had not been counted.
Stunned, Lowry spent four years trying to get to the bottom of what had happened. He made repeated requests for a copy of his ballot, but the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, Miriam Oliphant, stonewalled until the statute of limitations had expired. In November of 2003, Jeb Bush suspended Oliphant for incompetence.
Eventually he received a copy of his voided ballot and–in late 2003–presented it to the Florida Elections Commission which validated his claim and sent a letter to the new Supervisor of Elections, Brenda Snipes, requesting that his ballot be counted in the official result.
Lowry writes:
Brenda Snipes never responded to the letter. To date, my ballot has never been opened or counted.
I believe that thousands of Floridian absentee ballots from that election were fraudulently stamped with incorrect dates of receipt. The Supervisor of Elections knows there is no tracking system on ballots handled by the U.S. Postal Service. With no tracking, the receiver can stamp them as “late” without fear of being caught. It’s the perfect crime.
I can’t speak to the motive. Some election workers might just be lazy. But let’s say an unscrupulous hyper-partisan entity decided to sort the ballots by party registration and decide which ballots to open and count, and which ones to mark “late”?
Dr. Brenda Snipes, took no action to count my vote. She just swept it under the rug.
My vote was stolen by some unscrupulous government servant. Unfortunately, Miriam Oliphant was never charged with a misdemeanor for stealing my vote, because she stonewalled and denied access to the evidence I needed to prove my case. Oliphant’s replacement, Dr. Brenda Snipes, took no action to count my vote. She just swept it under the rug.
But I did succeed in proving that George W. Bush won by 538 votes, not 537. I guess that’s something.
The question now is: What about Brenda Snipes? It would be unwise for Governor Scott to suspend Snipes. His name is on the ballot in a close contest. Scott has a glaring conflict of interest. Florida Secretary of State Ken Dextner needs to act immediately to suspend and replace Snipes before she completely destroys what little remains of Broward County voter confidence. It’s overdue.
For the full article, click HERE.
