Affidavit of Chelsey Marie Smith in Broward County 2016 General Election

Citizens Oversight (2016-11-03) Ray Lutz

This Page: https://copswiki.org/Common/M1955
Media Link: https://copswiki.org/w/pub/Common/M1955/Affidavit-Chelsey%20Smith%202016.pdf%20type%3d%22html%22
More Info: Election Integrity

I am a bit bothered by the idea that this person was fired, but did not follow it up with a false termination case, if indeed it was an illegitimate firing.

She mixes up her statements. In #4 she says she was carrying absentee ballot request forms.

In #5 she says "eventually one of the employees opened the door, took the ballots from me, and closed the door." But they were not ballots, they were request forms.

In #6, she was asked to bring more absentee request forms.

In #7 she says they "told me to place my ballots on a different table". Again, She should have said "request forms"

The "Filling out election ballots" could have been a remaking procedure, which is commonly used, when the ballots are damaged in some fashion, and not a conspiracy to stuff the ballot box.

This person is not very experienced and may not have been able to tell the difference. She was just a temp. She was familiar with the appearance of ballots, not because she has worked with them day in and day out, but because "One of my supervisors, Dozel Spencer, had reviewed the various ballots with me as part of my training." So she was only barely aware of the procedures there.

It is a very good procedure to have four people reviewing the remaking process.

This is likely not an act to "stuff the ballot box" but simply a ballot remaking process, which happens in every election office. What they don't do very well is to document which ballots are remade. This would help the public track the scale of the remaking process. Normally, you can also go in and review the remade ballots to make sure they are correct. The newer way to do this is to enter the ballots into a BMD device and get a printed ballot summary with barcode. That is what you will usually see today, and still it is an area of concern, but it does not normally rise to the scale necessary to flip the election.

Most areas of the country are allowed to start processing absentee ballots prior to election day, such as doing signature verification, removing the ballots from the envelopes, and readying them for scanning, and then even scanning them and keeping the extracted vote sequestered. It is common in such ballots for voters to want to make changes if they marked one item and wanted to change it, so they can X out the first one and mark the second one, so the machine scanner will extract the vote correctly.

Also, we can note that she says her regular hours were from 8AM to 9PM, and on the day she was terminated, she reported at 9AM, a hour late. Her termination may have been simply due to this fact rather than the concept that she had witnessed something nefarious.

--Ray

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