Florida Election Official Brenda Snipes Resigns Following Contentious Midterms

Brenda Snipes, the Broward County, Florida Supervisor of Elections who has faced nationwide scrutiny following a contentious midterm election, submitted her resignation on Sunday. According to the Sun-Sentinel, Snipes’ resignation brings an end to a 15-year tenure mired with controversy, legal disputes and endless criticism. This past election year, Snipes has been the target of several Republicans, including President Donald Trump and outgoing Gov. (soon to be Senator) Rick Scott, for her county’s handling of the neck-to-neck senate and gubernatorial races. “It is true. She did send it,” Burnadette Norris-Weeks, an attorney who works as counsel to the Supervisor of Elections Office, confirmed to the Sun-Sentinel. Norris-Weeks said that in an early draft of the letter which she saw, Snipes had written that she wanted to spend more time with her family. It is unclear at what date the resignation will be effective. During this election period, Broward County was the odd-one out for the most part, taking a long time to finish counting votes. On top of that, Snipes was unable to say how many ballots had yet to be counted or accounted for, with her office not reporting updates as frequently as it was legally required to. During the recount process, there were other issues, and Snipes herself acknowledged that some 2,040 ballots that had been included in the fist vote count could not be accounted for in the machine recount. Snipes claimed at the time that the ballots had been either misplaced, misfiled, or mixed in with another stack of ballots.