Remember Brenda Snipes? She’s the Broward County election supervisor who couldn’t get her act together on election night or during the recount that followed. Snipes resigned last week with the resignation set to take effect in January. That apparently wasn’t good enough for outgoing Gov. Rick Scott. Today he announced that Snipes had been suspended. From Politico:

“Every eligible voter in Florida deserves their vote to be counted and should have confidence in Florida’s elections process,” Scott said in a written statement to POLITICO. “After a series of inexcusable actions, it’s clear that there needs to be an immediate change in Broward County and taxpayers should no longer be burdened by paying a salary for a Supervisor of Elections who has already announced resignation.”… Scott could have let Snipes just leave office Jan. 4 — the date she gave as her original early retirement — but the governor felt she needed to be punished for running such a bad shop for so long, according to a person familiar with his thinking. “It was a long time coming,” said a source familiar with Scott’s thinking and decision. “Snipes had it coming to her.”

Snipes was under fire for her inability to report, as required by state law, the number of outstanding ballots yet to be counted. A Broward County judge gave Snipes a deadline to rectify that problem which she failed to meet.

When a machine recount was ordered for the Senate and Governor’s race, Broward County faded into the background a bit as failures in Palm Beach County came to the forefront. But in the end, Broward failed to meet the state’s recount deadline by two minutes, forcing the state to certify the previous count. And it wasn’t just Republicans complaining.

Democrats said they couldn’t support Snipes any more, either. And some suspect that the flawed ballot she designed in Broward County may have led to so many undervotes that it helped cost Scott’s Democratic opponent, Sen. Bill Nelson, the election.

All in all, not a very good performance. And as I pointed out here, 2018 wasn’t the first time Snipes got in trouble at her job. There were problems in 2016 and 2012 as well. Snipes should have been out of a job a while ago. Why it took this long is a Florida mystery. Now if only we could get rid of a few more folks in Broward County.