Without election integrity we do not have a democracy!

We the undersigned demand immediate action by the House Administration Committee to investigate the November 6, 2018 election in Florida’s 23rd Congressional District. The official election results certified that Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the incumbent Democrat, as the winner. The election has been challenged in the House by Tim Canova, a law professor, who ran as an independent.

There's plenty of evidence casting significant doubt on these election results, including the following:

* Broward County election officials failed to maintain proper chain of custody of the paper ballots cast in the 2018 election.

* Florida election officials failed to maintain any proper chain of custody of the electronic voting machines.

* Broward County election officials failed to maintain digital scanned images of the ballots as directed by the Florida Secretary of State.

* The electronic scanning machines all had wireless cellular modems, and were thereby vulnerable to outside hackers.

* No one is permitted to inspect the software that was actually used in the election since the source code is considered “proprietary.”

Moreover, the official 2018 election results, as reported by Brenda Snipes, then the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, were highly suspect:

* For nearly 98,000 votes recorded for Wasserman Schultz, there was no indication of where, when, and how they were cast (in vote by mail, early voting, Election Day, or provisional ballots.) A month after the election was certified, an unverifiable Excel document was finally provided. FL elections rule 1S-2.053, which allows this hiding of votes, and the obstacles to obtaining public records requests are the opposite of transparency.

* Canova’s share of the official vote was 5% in every demographic group, a result so implausible that one highly credentialed expert in statistics and computational science concluded that it was as likely as winning the lottery every day for a year.

2018 was not the first suspicious election in Florida’s 23rd Congressional District. In 2016, Wasserman Schultz survived a hotly contested Democratic primary challenge from Professor Canova, who later sought to inspect the paper ballots cast in the primary. When the Broward County Supervisor of Elections stonewalled Canova’s public records request, he filed a lawsuit to enforce his inspection rights. But while that lawsuit was pending, Snipes destroyed all the paper ballots. The Florida Circuit Court granted summary judgment to Canova in May 2018, ruling that Snipes had violated numerous state and federal criminal statutes by destroying the ballots. To this date, there has been no criminal investigation of Snipes’ illegal ballot destruction.

Article I, Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution authorizes each House of Congress to be the final judge of the qualifications and elections of its members. Canova filed his election contest with the Clerk of the House and the House Administration Committee in December 2018. In early January 2019, the House of Representatives seated Wasserman Schultz without considering Canova’s complaint, thereby rendering moot Canova's legal challenge in the Florida courts.

We demand that the House Administration Committee investigate the 2018 election in Florida’s 23rd Congressional District. We demand election justice and election integrity. We demand the rule of law and transparency in our elections.