By Tim Canova

I am writing to bring you up to date on the latest developments in our efforts to expose the corruption in our election system.

Some weeks ago, I filed a lawsuit in Florida Circuit Court contesting the results of our November 6, 2018 election against Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Our lawyers then provided notice to the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives of our challenge and submitted a complaint requesting that the House not seat Wasserman Schultz.

Make no mistake, there are solid grounds for questioning our election results. For nearly 100,000 votes purportedly cast for Wasserman Schultz, there was no indication of where, when, or how the ballots were actually cast. According to computer programming experts, this is an indication that those votes could have been shifted from me or another candidate to Wasserman Schultz by hackers or insiders simply altering the software source code through the wireless cellular modems on the electronic scanning and tabulator machines used in Broward County. And that software is closed source, meaning it’s considered “proprietary” — the private property of the software vendors, and not subject to inspection by our experts or by anyone. We are literally asked to trust the results on blind faith.

There’s also compelling statistical evidence of election rigging. Our campaign was capped at an unlikely 5% of the vote. Moreover, we were capped at that level for every demographic group — something so unbelievable that a leading expert in computational science concluded it was as likely as winning the lottery every day for a year! Those who talk about the need to follow the science of climate change should follow the science of statistics and mathematics.

There’s also no reason to trust a recount of the purported ballots. The disgraced former Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes and other election officials failed to safeguard the chain of custody of the paper ballots, the electronic voting machines, and the digital scanned ballot images. That’s why we’re not seeking a recount, but rather asking the House to invalidate the election results and to order a re-vote.

Unfortunately, when the new Congress convened last week, the House voted to seat Wasserman Schultz without any inquiry into our election results. This was déjà vu all over again! After a Florida court ruled last May that Brenda Snipes had illegally destroyed all the ballots cast in our 2016 Democratic primary against Wasserman Schultz, I wrote to every House and Senate member. The silence was deafening. Not one member of Congress even bothered to respond to our plea for a Congressional investigation.

The U.S. Constitution makes clear that the House is the final judge of the qualifications and elections of its members. Now that the House has seated Wasserman Schultz, our lawsuit is effectively moot as a procedural matter and we expect the Florida Circuit Court to dismiss the case any day now on narrow procedural grounds. And since the lawsuit is mooted by the House action, we will not be appealing the court’s expected dismissal.

The good news is that even though Wasserman Schultz has been seated, there’s nothing stopping the House Committee for Administration from conducting hearings on our fake election, invalidating the election, and ordering a re-vote.

There’s much more at stake here than one congressional district. This system of “black box voting” undermines public faith and confidence in our election results. If the electronic voting machines were rigged in Broward County, they can be rigged almost anywhere. If we fail to clean up this corrupt election system now, electronic voting machines may well be rigged in some of the 2020 presidential primaries and general election — and perhaps not by the Russians or Chinese.

That’s why I’ve been calling for banning these inherently vulnerable electronic voting machines and replacing them with a system of 100% hand-marked paper ballots counted by hand in public. Nothing less will help restore the conditions necessary for a functioning democracy.