Florida Voting Boss Takes Fact-Finding To Broward

FT. LAUDERDALE (CBSMiami) - As Broward County Elections prepares for another election in January, Wednesday the county took a step back to look at what happened in November.

"I'm just not really in the blame game, because why you blame you can be making things happen differently," Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes told CBS4. "So I'm not looking to place blame and I hope people are not dumping blame on my head either."

Snipes spoke candidly Wednesday after a closed-to-cameras meeting with Florida's Secretary of State Ken Detzner. Detzner is on a tour of election screw-ups in six Florida counties. "We are not here to find blame. We are here to find solutions," Detzner explained to a panel in Miami-Dade of Tuesday.

Broward's problems from the election were quite similar to Miami-Dade's. The large county and voting block experienced long lines at early voting and a backup to get absentee ballots. In the days leading up to the election voters became increasingly frustrated.

"Chaos. Total Chaos. I don't even know if my vote is going to count," one voter said outside the election annex in Lauderhill. But it was after the election that really raised eyebrows with the discovery of nearly a thousand uncounted votes.

"Everything that we added was here. We didn't go 95 and find a ballot bin on the side of the road. We really didn't" Snipes explained to CBS4 the day the votes were added.

Snipes said Wednesday her request of the state will be to roll back Florida House bill 1355. "When we look at HB 1355 I think there are some changes that may have impacted our election."

House bill 1355 limited early voting to eight days and limited those polling sites to libraries and city halls. It also changed the way they count absentee votes, demanding every vote be counted election night.

Since the election some of the blame has been put on legislators for doing what appears to be voter suppression. "I don't have animosity for the legislators. They did what they think was best," Snipes said.

Snipes would like to see at least two weeks of early voting instead of the current one.

The Secretary will take his findings back to Tallahassee to present to the Governor in February. He'll also have reviews from two task forces,one in Dade and one in Broward.