Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.

Once again, America’s eyes have turned to Broward County, Florida. And once again, America’s eyes are rolling.

This time, the object of scorn is the county’s perennially troubled elections department, which was under fire for missing deadlines, mishandling ballots and mismanaging elections even before its slow and erratic vote-counting after last week’s midterms. But a year before Broward Election Supervisor Brenda Snipes became a target for national ridicule, a similarly harsh spotlight fell on the county’s sheriff, Scott Israel, over his department’s botched response to the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Broward’s school system also served time under the national media microscope after the Parkland shooting, for its inadequate response to multiple warning signs about the shooter.


These aren’t new problems for this Democratic stronghold of 2 million residents crammed between the Everglades and the Atlantic Ocean, which got its name from the colorful and corrupt turn-of-the-century governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward. Snipes got her job after Broward’s last elections supervisor was removed from office for incompetence in 2003. A previous county sheriff went to jail in 2007. And a grand jury castigated Broward’s school board for “gross mismanagement and ineptitude” after multiple corruption scandals in 2011. So far, no one has produced a shred of evidence to support President Donald Trump’s allegations that Broward Democrats are trying to steal the midterm elections through a “massively infected” recount process, but he wasn’t wrong when he told reporters: “If you look at Broward County, they have a horrible history.”

In a state that’s not exactly known for its good-government ethic, Broward does seem to produce a disproportionate share of political scandals, from a school board member who stashed her bribes in a restaurant doggie bag to a state representative who billed his legal clients for the time he spent having sex with them. It’s only fitting that Broward resident Roger Stone is under investigation for his role in the WikiLeaks hack that forced Broward Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign as chair of the Democratic National Committee. Florida always seems to play a key role in America’s messes, from the 2000 presidential recount to the 2008 financial crisis, and metropolitan Fort Lauderdale’s densely populated county is carving out a niche as Florida’s Florida.

So what’s the matter with Broward? Republicans tend to blame one-party Democratic rule, and even some Democrats agree that the lack of serious partisan competition has led to bad incentives and bad habits for county leaders, just as uninterrupted Republican rule at the state level has helped make Tallahassee’s political culture dysfunctional. Broward’s decentralized political structure, with a new and largely ceremonial mayor chosen every year from a nine-member county commission, has also reduced accountability: Broward’s independent fiefdoms like the election office, sheriff’s department and schools are essentially free to run wild. Broward’s public health system has been particularly problematic. Its CEO committed suicide in 2016 amid a federal investigation into shady contracts, and his successor, who got the job despite having a degree from a defunct diploma mill and despite being under indictment, recently resigned after less than a year in office.

Broward County is probably best known for the sun-kissed Fort Lauderdale beaches immortalized in the 1960 spring break movie Where the Boys Are, even though Fort Lauderdale is now a relatively staid family destination where the boys haven’t been in decades. The county is now defined by the surrounding cluster of increasingly diverse suburbs carved out of Everglades swampland. “Browardization” has become a Florida term of art for overdeveloped and auto-dependent sprawl. It’s no coincidence that the only Fortune 500 company headquartered in this traffic-choked county is AutoNation; it’s also no coincidence that the mad-as-hell novelist and columnist Carl Hiaasen, the bard of Florida’s corruption and environmental devastation, grew up in Plantation in west Broward.

Still, Broward isn’t Florida’s only county that’s been Browardized, or for that matter America’s only county with one-party rule or decentralized governance. It might just be a place where weird stuff happens to happen, like last month’s arrest in Plantation of the Trump supporter who tried to mail pipe bombs to Wasserman Schultz and other prominent Democrats, or this summer’s instantly viral spat in Hallandale where the mayor accused a commissioner of making a living off “sphincter bleaching.” When it became clear that the latest Florida recount frenzy would revolve around Broward as well, locals did not seem overly gobsmacked. They’re accustomed to scenes that feel ripped out of a Hiaasen novel.

“We take the cake on crazy in Broward,” says Richard DeNapoli, a local attorney and Republican state committeeman. “I don’t think anyone’s surprised that we’re in the middle of another embarrassment.”

It’s certainly no surprise that Broward is in the middle of another election embarrassment. Snipes has been involved in so many snafus that the Miami Herald published a story on her agency four days before the midterms titled “Inside the Most Controversial Elections Department in Florida.” In recent years, her office has sent out mail-in ballots that were missing a constitutional amendment, improperly opened ballots in private and illegally destroyed ballots from Wasserman Schultz’s 2016 congressional race. Broward is almost invariably the last of Florida’s 67 counties to report its election results, and the Florida secretary of state actually stationed monitors in Broward on Tuesday to look out for sketchy activity.

They didn’t find any. So far, the department’s most egregious foul-up in this election hurt the Democrats; a shoddy ballot design that tucked the Florida Senate race beneath the Creole-language instructions may explain why so many Broward voters—almost 4 percent of them—left that contest blank, perhaps reducing Democratic Senator Bill Nelson’s margins in the county enough to swing his seat to Republican Governor Rick Scott. The blunder was reminiscent of the “butterfly ballot” that may have cost Democrat Al Gore the 2000 presidential election in neighboring Palm Beach County, which earned a similar “Corruption County” reputation after a slew of indictments a decade ago, and is now frequently in the news as the home of Trump’s “winter White House.”

But even though there was no evidence that Snipes and her team engaged in nefarious partisan shenanigans in the midterms, there’s mounting evidence that they’re bad at running elections. Broward once again lagged the rest of Florida in reporting its results, and at key moments Snipes was unable to inform the public how many votes still remained to be counted. The county’s usual cavalcade of missed deadlines and technical glitches has lent a veneer of plausibility to Republican conspiracy theories, even though a judge rejected Scott’s efforts to impound Broward’s voting machines, and Scott’s own state police have said they’ve received no credible allegations of impropriety. Trump keeps trying to discredit the recount and rile up his base by tweeting innuendo about an insidious “Broward Effect” that fabricates votes for Democrats, but locally, there’s a fairly broad consensus that the Broward elections department is merely inept and imperious.

David Aronberg, the top prosecutor in Palm Beach County, recalls that when he tried to compile financial disclosures from write-in candidates in 12 counties that he suspected were part of a political scam, 11 of the election departments either had the information on their websites or gave it to him right away. Broward’s department bounced him around voice mail hell for a week, then told him he had to pick up the two-page document in person and pay a 25-cent processing fee. Aronberg eventually persuaded a county bureaucrat to email the forms, but the incident gave him new insight into the department’s reputation for incompetence.

“It was the worst experience I’ve had with any office around the state,” he says. “I mean, this is the 21st century! Let’s just say they’re … inefficient.”

Snipes is unlikely to keep her job for long. If she doesn’t quit under pressure, Governor Scott and the Republican Legislature are expected to oust her, and fed-up Democrats are not expected to fight to save her. But Sheriff Israel has kept his job even though he hailed his own “amazing leadership” after his deputies waited passively outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High while Nikolas Cruz was gunning down its students. The status quo largely prevailed at the Broward schools as well, even though the board had canceled a pilot program to use metal detectors, and even though the administration had shuffled Cruz from school to school despite repeated examples of threatening behavior.

One obstacle to change may be the Democratic stranglehold on county government. Broward’s dominant coalition of northeastern transplants, liberal Jews, African-Americans and a rising tide of Caribbean immigrants has insulated Democratic officers from having to worry about Republican challengers. Kartik Krishnaiyer, a former Democratic operative from Coral Springs who runs a progressive website called The Florida Squeeze, says that the sugar industry, the construction industry and other special interests often invest in local Democratic primaries rather than waste money in pre-determined general elections, knowing that the winners usually get to keep their jobs as long as they want them. And Democrats at the state and national level tend to tolerate the routine messiness of the county, because Broward is the bluest part of their base in a purple state.

“I’ve watched the Democrats in Broward get very comfortable with power,” Krishnaiyer says. “There’s no accountability, because there’s no competition.”

Democrats always count on big margins throughout southeast Florida, but there are enough Cuban-American Republicans in Miami-Dade to the south and country-club Republicans in Palm Beach to the north to keep those counties less politically lopsided. The current mayor of Miami-Dade is a Republican, and while the county commission is officially nonpartisan, Republicans held a 7-6 majority there until a seat flipped in June. By contrast, Democrats outnumber Republicans on Broward’s commission by 8-1—and after Tuesday’s results, the split will be 9-0.

In fairness, while Miami-Dade’s elections have been running smoothly in recent years, its turbulent politics are not considered a national model, either. Some Broward Democrats argue that their problems are not so atypical for a large and underfunded urban county, especially one with 31 independent municipalities and no one in charge. Snipes herself made this case to the Herald before the election: “I think the problems are blown out of proportion. Broward is nitpicked to the bone.” Mitchell Berger, a prominent Fort Lauderdale attorney and Democratic donor, points out that tabulating ballots is a lot more logistically challenging in Broward than the rural counties that reported their results in a timelier manner. And Berger believes a mayor who didn’t rotate out every year and wasn’t a mere functionary might be able to rein in some of the county’s wayward departments.

“The structure makes it really troublesome to govern,” Berger says. “I mean, we could never compete to bring in an Amazon—who would they even talk to?”

A lot of Broward residents see the periodic scandals and outrages and CNN footage of activists screaming to lock someone up as unfortunate distractions that needlessly damage the reputation of a nice place to live and raise a family. Broward has America’s largest single-story outlet mall, America’s only internationally sanctioned cricket stadium and the world’s largest annual boat show. Money magazine recently ranked the bedroom community of Weston the 21st-best place to live in America, and Mayor Dan Stermer believes it could be a national model—for diversity, with its vibrant Venezuelan and Colombian communities; for prosperity, with projected 6 percent annual job growth over the next five years; and even for limited government, with only 10 full-time city employees for 68,000 residents. But those kind of details get overshadowed by indictments and cable-news trucks.

“It’s frustrating,” says Stermer, a part-time mayor whose day job is management consulting. “Here in Weston we have a lot of businesspeople who just want to see things done right. Obviously in Broward that doesn’t always happen.”

In a way, Broward County’s scandals and failures uphold its namesake’s legacy. Governor Broward was a riverboat captain who made his name smuggling guns and explosives to Cuban rebels before the Spanish-American War, then got elected on a single-minded pledge to drain the Everglades. His drainage project was an utter failure, giving rise to enduring jokes about selling swampland in Florida, though he did make a lot of money from sketchy side deals with the men selling that swampland. Decades after his death, the federal government finally achieved his vision of draining the eastern Everglades, so Broward County now has Sawgrass Expressway in former sawgrass marshes, and the Florida Panthers ice-hockey arena in a former panther habitat. It also has a political swamp that gets periodically drained by federal investigators, but occasionally surfaces on national TV.

Brad Meltzer, a best-selling author who writes thrillers at home in Hollywood, says modern Broward is home to a unique genre of crazy, the kind of crazy that, unlike conspicuous-consumption Palm Beach or narcissistic-showoff Miami-Dade, prefers to keep its crazy private. But every now and then, the crazy bursts into the open. The tragedy in Parkland was one of those moments, exposing some of the rot in Broward’s sheriff’s office and schools. The recount is becoming another moment, introducing Broward’s klutzy election division to the nation. The two stories even collided this week when it came out that Cruz, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas gunman, registered to vote while awaiting trial in the Broward County Jail.

He registered as a Republican.

“I’m a fiction writer, but my editor would never let me get away with this stuff,” Meltzer says. “She’d say: ‘Come on. Crazy is OK, but this is too crazy.’”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this piece misspelled Richard DeNapoli’s surname.