Iowa caucus meltdown puns prove that Broward County can’t escape its reputation
Everybody’s got jokes about the Iowa caucuses. And Broward County is the punch line.
As the nation waits on the delayed results of the Democratic primary’s first contest, technical problems and extended reporting delays plaguing Iowa have triggered comparisons to much-maligned Broward County’s election operations — the South Florida office that struggled to count votes in the 2000 presidential contest and misplaced thousands of ballots in the 2018 midterm elections.
In a Monday night interview with The Washington Post, Max Steele, a spokesman for Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar quipped that “Iowa is the Broward County of caucuses.” And on Twitter, jokes about retired Broward elections supervisor Brenda Snipes and voter fraud conspiracy theories became en vogue again for the first time in more than a year.
“Tens of thousands of ballots all for Joe Biden [are] being shipped to Iowa from Broward County Florida as we speak,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted facetiously just before 1 a.m. Tuesday as the night wore on with no results.
Bad puns aside, the quips were a reminder that the elections office in Florida’s most Democratic county still has a tattered reputation to repair ahead of Florida’s March 17 presidential primary. And they were a warning that the county — which was among dozens targeted in 2016 by Russian hackers — will not only be under close scrutiny in 2020 but also subject to efforts to undermine the credibility of its results.
“Anytime there’s a mess-up in an election somewhere, Broward County bubbles up again,” said Mitch Ceasar, a former chairman of the Broward Democratic Party running to become the county’s next supervisor of elections. “Everything that happens in Broward is magnified beyond normal proportions.”
The county’s elections office has earned the bad publicity. In 2000, Broward County was among the Florida jurisdictions that struggled with the infamous Bush-Gore presidential recount. In the years since, two Broward elections supervisors have been suspended by Florida governors, including Snipes, who was removed from office in 2018 following an error-plagued recount process that threatened to throw three statewide races into tumult.
But the office has also been the subject of misinformation, with President Donald Trump hurling unfounded accusations of fraud against Snipes during the 2018 recount and Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio amplifying speculation that some boxes left behind at local precincts possibly contained ballots. (An attorney for the Broward elections office said the boxes contained supplies.)
During the recount, protesters gathered outside the office’s headquarters alleging that blank ballots were trucked into elections headquarters under the cover of night.
Snipes’ appointed successor, Pete Antonacci, declined through a spokesman to discuss the Iowa-related jabs about Broward. “There is no reason to comment on the misery of others except to say that running elections and ensuring fast accurate results is always a challenge,” he said.
Antonacci’s office has had several dry runs overseeing small municipal elections that concluded without complication. And the Florida Legislature passed an elections omnibus bill last year that included provisions intended to ease some of the pressure and deadlines placed on large metropolitan elections offices in a state where tight elections have magnified the consequences of election mishaps.
But Ceasar said Broward’s credibility will likely be questioned until the office overseeing Florida’s most Democratic county proves it can handle the crush of a presidential election.
“You’re only as good as your last election,” he said. “And we haven’t had a new one.”
This story was originally published February 4, 2020 at 12:01 PM.
