Source: Politico

MIAMI — Before she could retire early in January, Gov. Rick Scott decided Friday to suspend Brenda Snipes, Broward County’s troubled election supervisor, from office following a series of voting and ballot controversies that culminated in the 2018 midterms when the Republican had to sue her to get public information.

“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.”

Snipes, an elected official whose term ends after the 2020 elections, will be replaced by Scott’s longtime fixer, attorney Pete Antonacci, Scott’s former general counsel who does not plan to run for the Broward elections position and who has been appointed by Scott to fill three other posts, including his current job as president and CEO of Enterprise Florida.

Snipes did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Read more: https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2018/11/30/scott-suspends-browards-controversial-election-chief-before-she-can-quit-early-721671

Source: The Jerusalem Post

CNN political commentator and Temple University Professor Marc Lamont Hill was reportedly fired from the news network on Thursday after he told the United Nations a day earlier that there needs to be “a free Palestine from the river to the sea.” The comment is interpreted as meaning the removal and destruction of the State of Israel.

Hill accused Israel of denying “citizenship rights and due process to Palestinians just because they are not Jewish,” and expressed his support for the BDS movement. Hill stressed that, although peace is an ideal, “we must not romanticize or fetishize it. We must promote nonviolence at every opportunity, but cannot endorse narrow politics that shames Palestinians for resisting, for refusing to do nothing in ethnic cleansing.”

The Washington Examiner reported Thursday evening that Hill had been fired for the comment. It quoted a CNN spokesperson saying that: “Marc Lamont Hill is no longer under contract with CNN."

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) responded to Hill’s speech, calling his comment “divisive” and “destructive” in an email to the Jewish Journal.

Read more: https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/gaza-news/CNN-commentator-Free-Palestine-from-the-river-to-the-sea-573104/amp

Source: Sun-sentinel

Broward County’s ballot recount hit yet another snag Saturday with 2,040 ballots lost or misplaced.

The county’s eternally beleaguered Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes said they either misplaced, misfiled or mixed in with another stack

One thing she said she was sure of: “The ballots are in this building.”

“There would be nowhere else for them to be,” Snipes said. “The ballots are in the building. The ballots are in the building.”

Read more: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/fl-ne-broward-manual-recount-agriculture-commissioner-20181117-story,amp.html?__twitter_impression=true

Source: Sun-sentinel

Democrat Andrew Gillum says he is ending his hard-fought race for Florida governor and has congratulated Republican Ron DeSantis.

Gillum posted a live video on Facebook on Saturday afternoon in which he congratulated DeSantis. Gillum had conceded to DeSantis on election night, but retracted it after the margin between the two candidates narrowed. The race went to a legally required recount, but after an initial machine recount DeSantis still led Gillum by more than 30,000 votes.

Gillum, who is Tallahassee's mayor, isn't saying what he plans to do next.

"Stay tuned," he said in his brief remarks. Nonetheless, Gillum says he will remain politically active, adding "the fight for Florida continues."

Read more: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/ct-florida-governor-senate-election-recount-20181117-story,amp.html?__twitter_impression=true

Source: The Miami Herald

Even with a late start to the morning, volunteers for Broward County finished the manual recount for the U.S. senate race Friday in under two hours — before the catered lunch even arrived.

Broward County Canvassing Board Attorney René Harrod announced the volunteers were done for the day at 10 a.m. Many will return Saturday to count the Agricultural Commission race and Sunday to count a local commission race.

While officials have given no official count or estimate on the number of under and over votes counted Friday, numbers reported to the state indicate there were about 32,000 in Broward.

Broward County’s lightning speed on counting the vote appears to be due to the hundreds of volunteers at work, as well as a large amount of undervotes — votes for neither senate candidate.

Read more: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/broward/article221762800.html

Source: Politico

TALLAHASSEE — The Florida Department of State last week asked federal prosecutors to investigate dates that were changed on official state election documents, the first voting “irregularities” it has flagged in the wake of the 2018 elections.

The concerns, which the department says can be tied to the Florida Democratic Party, center around date changes on forms used to fix vote-by-mail ballots sent with incorrect or missing information. Known as “cure affidavits,” those documents used to fix mail ballots were due no later than 5 p.m. on Nov. 5 — the day before the election. But affidavits released on Tuesday by the DOS show that documents from four different counties said the ballots could be returned by 5 p.m. on Thursday, which is not accurate.

Among those counties is Broward, which emerged as the epicenter of controversy as three statewide races and three local legislative races went into recounts following the Nov. 6 elections. Republicans have pointed to embattled Broward Elections chief Brenda Snipes' record of past election gaffes in arguing that the largely Democratic country is tilted against them — perhaps fraudulently so.

DOS officials have repeatedly told the media that the monitors they sent to Broward County saw no election fraud. It wasn't until Tuesday that the office revealed publicly that it had turned over information to federal prosecutors.

Read more: https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2018/11/13/federal-prosecutors-reviewing-altered-election-documents-tied-to-florida-democrats-695299

Source: The Miami Herald

Broward’s elections supervisor accidentally mixed more than a dozen rejected ballots with nearly 200 valid ones, a circumstance that is unlikely to help Brenda Snipes push back against Republican allegations of incompetence.

The mistake — for which no one had a solution Friday night — was discovered after Snipes agreed to present 205 provisional ballots to the Broward County canvassing board for inspection. She had initially intended to handle the ballots administratively, but agreed to present them to the canvassing board after Republican attorneys objected.

“We have found no clear authority controlling the situation faced by the board,” said Broward County Attorney Andrew Meyers.

On Election Day, Broward County collected more than 600 provisional ballots. The vast majority were declared invalid by the county’s canvassing board judges for reasons ranging from registering to vote too late to previously voting to voting at the wrong precinct.

Read more: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/broward/article221452655.html

Source: The Washington Post

In the quixotic battle against old age, some people use skin care and spin class.

That’s not enough for Emile Ratelband, a 69-year-old who feels like he’s in his 40s. The Dutch pensioner is asking a court in his hometown of Arnhem, southeast of Amsterdam, to change his birth certificate so that it says he took his first breath on March 11, 1969, rather than on March 11, 1949. The judges heard his case on Monday and promised they would render a verdict in the next several weeks.

Ratelband sees his request as no different from a petition to change his name or the gender he was assigned at birth — and isn’t bothered that this comparison might offend transgender people, whose medical needs have been recognized by the American Medical Association. It comes down to free will, he maintains.

“Because nowadays, in Europe and in the United States, we are free people,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post. “We can make our own decisions if we want to change our name, or if we want to change our gender. So I want to change my age. My feeling about my body and about my mind is that I’m about 40 or 45.”

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/nation/2018/11/08/year-old-man-asks-be-declared-claiming-age-is-fluid-gender/?__twitter_impression=true&noredirect=on

U. S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, was easily elected to an eighth term in the 2018 midterm elections, receiving 58.4 percent of the vote.

That’s a higher percentage of the vote than she received two years ago.

Joe Kaufman, the perennial Republican candidate, received 36 percent of the vote on Tuesday.

Tim Canova received just 4.9 percent of the vote in his second attempt to oust Wasserman Schultz. That works out to less than one vote for every 11 people who voted for the incumbent.

more: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/fl-ne-wasserman-schultz-tim-canova-results-20181107-story,amp.html?__twitter_impression=true

Source: USA Today

WASHINGTON - Just days before the midterm elections, Sen. Chuck Grassley asked the federal authorities on Friday to investigate another person he says made false claims against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Grassley, in a letter to the Justice Department and FBI, said a woman by the name of Judy Munro-Leighton took responsibility for authoring an anonymous letter that made allegations that Kavanaugh and a friend raped her. After she was tracked down and interviewed by Senate investigators, the woman recanted and said she was not the author and had never met Kavanaugh.

Grassley claims the woman is a left-wing activist and told investigators it was "just a ploy," he wrote in the letter. Her full comments to investigators were not made available and efforts by USA TODAY to reach Munro-Leighton were unsuccessful.

The letter marks the fourth request Grassley has made of federal authorities to investigate those involved in the controversial Kavanaugh proceedings, which were extended due to a series of sexual assault allegations surfacing when Kavanaugh was in high school and college.

Read more: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/1863210002