Controversy arose in 2016 when Republican poll watchers complained that Broward County Election Supervisor Brenda Snipes’ staff was opening the ballots in private. | AP Photo Judge sides with Florida GOP in absentee ballot dispute with Broward County

A judge has ordered the election supervisor in Florida’s second-most populous county to change the way she handles vote-by-mail absentee ballots after the Republican Party sued her for not following the law.

The declaratory injunction, ordered Friday, prevents Broward County Election Supervisor Brenda Snipes from opening the mail-in ballots in secret or before the county’s three-member Canvassing Board meets to determine the ballots’ validity. The board can begin meeting Monday to handle absentee ballots, more than 75,000 of which have been cast in Broward ahead of the Aug. 28 primaries.


“We appreciate the court’s order clarifying what Florida law plainly requires — that Supervisor Snipes and her staff must safely keep and may not open any vote-by-mail ballot until the Broward County Canvassing Board canvasses the vote,” said Yohana de la Torre, spokeswoman for the Republican Party of Florida. “The Court’s ruling helps to protect the integrity of this year’s election process not just for Republicans but all voters in Broward County.”

Snipes and her attorney, Burnadette Norris-Weeks, could not be reached for comment.

The ruling is the second major loss for Snipes’ office in court this year. In May, a judge criticized her office for breaking the law by destroying ballots too soon in the 2016 congressional primary between Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova. Snipes earlier won a federal case concerning voter-roll maintenance. Broward has nearly 1.15 million voters, second only to Miami-Dade’s voter population of nearly 1.4 million.

The cases come during a period of heightened scrutiny of elections’ processes and machinery in light of attempts by hackers to penetrate election systems, which has become an issue in the U.S. Senate race between Gov. Rick Scott and Sen. Bill Nelson. Over the weekend, an 11-year-old at the DEFCON hacking conference showed how Florida’s 2016 presidential election results could have been changed on the Florida secretary of state’s website.

In the absentee ballot case, controversy arose in 2016 when Republican poll watchers complained that Snipes’ staff was opening the ballots in private, thereby making it impossible for citizens or groups to question whether the ballots were properly cast.

After Broward made a brief accommodation, the party sued in January of 2017 to make sure Snipes followed the law.

Under state law, an elector or campaign can challenge the lawfulness of an absentee ballot, but only before the ballot has been opened from its mail-in envelope. By opening the ballot before it got to the three-member Canvassing Board, the Republican Party complained, Snipes’ office was breaking the law and making any challenge impossible.

The board reviews absentee ballots to make sure they weren’t cast fraudulently. Vote-by-mail ballot envelopes must be properly signed by a voter, the signature on the envelope has to match the voter’s signature on file and election officials need to make sure the ballot wasn’t cast after a voter had died.

According to the Friday ruling, Snipes appeared to believe her office could open ballots and begin tabulating them as long as the signatures matched. But if the ballot appeared to be cast by a dead person, she had to wait for canvassing board review. She also complained that the GOP was “trying to disrupt the election process,” the ruling said.

Though Snipes sits on her county’s Canvassing Board, her attorney appeared to make the novel argument that she didn’t know the meaning of the word “canvass,” an issue the judge brought up repeatedly in his 17-page ruling that also pointed out Snipes couldn’t show why he shouldn’t side with the party.

“Defendant has failed to rebut Plaintiff's entitlement to relief,” Judge Raag Singhal wrote in his order, “and has even admitted to misunderstanding the meaning of the word 'canvass.'”