Some numbers from the March 17 Democratic presidential preference election don't add up in Broward County, Fl., the second-most populous county in the third-most populous state in the nation, preliminary results show from an audit conducted by Citizens Audit of Broward.
The possibly contradictory numbers would not have influenced who won; Joe Biden swept to victory in the Sunshine State. click here
Citizens Audit, the volunteer organization that conducted the audits, was formed in part because Broward County, a Democratic stronghold, has a history of problems counting votes accurately. Republican governors have found causes of action to remove two Democratic Supervisors of Elections in Broward County in the last two decades. All 67 counties in Florida elect Supervisors of Elections every four years; the county officials report election results to the Florida Department of State, which oversees elections statewide. click here
Republican Peter Antonacci was appointed Supervisor of Elections in the South Florida county in 2018. He has promised to cooperate with the citizen audit group. So, audit leaders plan to share their findings with him to see if Antonacci can resolve discrepancies that in some instances deprived both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders of votes. Steve Vancore, a spokesman for the Broward election chief, said they await the report of the audit from the volunteer group of citizens and promised to review it as quickly as possible. click here
However, Vancore, in a follow up email, offered some possible context to the initial findings from Citizens Audit of Broward. For example, he said, sometimes a voter may vote for more than one candidate on a ballot at a polling station. Those votes are not valid and are not counted. Other times, Vancore added, "provisional ballots" are cast at the polling station and tabulated later.
Meanwhile, Jamie Friend, a leader of Citizens Audit, said her organization has filed public records requests for "tapes" that are displayed at voting precincts after voting ended on March 17.
A couple of dozen volunteer auditors went to more than 100 polling locations in Broward County to photograph the tapes after voting stopped at 7 p.m. The results were shared with Democracy Counts, a tech nonprofit organization in San Diego that created a same-day election audit app called "Actual Vote." click here
Dan Wolf, a Harvard-trained attorney and CEO of Democracy Counts, said the fact that vote totals for Biden and Sanders were not always accurate indicates human error and not corruption may be at play.
Volunteer auditors used the "Actual Vote" app on their cell phones and tablets to document voting results reported at polling stations. The results were transmitted to Democracy Counts. Generally, there are more than 400 voting sites in Broward County, which has about 1.2 million registered voters; 606,000 are registered Democrat and 252,000 are registered Republican. https://www.browardsoe.org/
The volunteer auditors compared the numbers they recorded at polling stations with figures released to the public by the Broward Supervisor of Elections and Florida Department of State, which oversees elections statewide. The review produced some figures that were different than those reported at some polling stations.
The volunteers carried out their efforts even though South Florida is one of the locations in the nation with rising numbers of people suffering during the Coronavirus pandemic. click here and https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/17/us-elections-voters-coronavirus
I will publish details on the numbers and possible discrepancies after Citizens Audit and the Broward Supervisor of Elections review and discuss the findings.
(Article changed on April 3, 2020 at 09:09)
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