by Catherine Smith
Nearly 24,000 voter files in Florida’s Palm Beach County were flagged because of issues that include “registrations in multiple states, double voting, voting on behalf of the dead, and registrations by ‘apparent’ noncitizens,” the Epoch Times reports.
“The issues found indicate that efforts at list maintenance over the years have either been lax, inconsistent, ignored or ineffective,” the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) stated in a November report.
Palm Beach County, where nearly 967,000 voters were registered as of Nov. 1, was criticized after the 2018 midterms for failing to complete state-mandated recounts by the deadline.
The county’s then-elections chief, Susan Bucher, was rebuked by a judge for allowing her staff to duplicate improperly completed ballots.
Bucher was suspended by the new governor, Republican Ron DeSantis and replaced with West Palm Beach attorney Wendy Link. “Link obtained more than $15 million from the county commission to get new voting machines, vote scanners, and other equipment that should be ready for the 2020 election, the South Florida,” Sun Sentinel reported.
The report, however, suggested that problems were “baked into the voter registry” and needed to be addressed.
Some of the problematic discoveries include more than 20,000 registrations of voters who were also registered in New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. Of these double registrants, 225 “apparently voted twice in 2016, 2018, or both,” the report stated. Additionally, more than 2,200 active registrations matched records of apparently deceased people. Of these diseased, more than 100 “actually cast ballots in recent elections in Palm Beach County after their dates of death.”
“The examples indicate that duplicate registrations are likely generated by both human error and potential faults within the voter registration system itself,” the report stated. “Regardless, the registration system should catch such errors but it is not doing so.”
The audit also discovered 68 registrations that were canceled because the people later admitted they weren’t U.S. citizens.
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Catherine Smith is a newcomer to Washington D.C. She met, and married an American journalist and moved to D.C from the U.K. She graduated with a B.A in Graphic, Media and Communications and worked in design and retail in the U.K.
Photo “Voting Sign” by Michael Arthur. CC BY-SA 2.0.
