The Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Office of Statewide Prosecution has opened up an investigation into the state’s Democratic Party over allegations of election fraud. From WCTV:
Evidence reported to the Department of State suggests a possible effort by Democrats to have voters fix ballots after the state’s deadline in at least four counties.Cure forms for mail ballots sent to voters by the party show the return date changed from the day before the election to two days afterwards.Democratic strategist Steve Schale says it was likely just a mix up.“Some 23-year-old staffer probably got two dates mixed up,” said Schale. “They put the date down for the provisional ballot cure, not the absentee ballot cure, and actually by doing it, all they did was make it harder for their own voters to vote.”
Florida’s Democrat Party has hired an investigator to look into these claims of altered “cure affidavit” forms.
Staffer Eli Logan wrote on Facebook that she has “plenty of documentation to prove” that the party knew about the altered forms. She claimed that she showed it to many in the leadership. From Naples Daily News:
Logan, one of the party staffers who was instructed to share the altered form with voters, said she was concerned party leadership was letting them take the fall for following a supervisor’s instructions.Logan declined to comment for this story, but in a message posted to the Facebook group “FDP Party leaders” she said she had nothing to do with the “creation of the altered form,” which the party is doing an internal investigation on.“I am terminally disappointed in the FDP, especially (Executive Director) Juan Penalosa, for not addressing this and for allowing other people like myself to take the fall for it,” Logan wrote.
This story came up last week. Naples Daily News explained:
The altered forms surfaced in Broward, Santa Rosa, Citrus and Okaloosa counties and were reported to federal prosecutors to review for possible election fraud as Florida counties completed a required recount in three top races.But an email obtained by the USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida shows that Florida Democrats were organizing a broader statewide effort beyond those counties to give voters the altered forms to fix improper absentee ballots after the Nov. 5 deadline. Democratic party leaders provided staffers with copies of a form, known as a “cure affidavit,” that had been modified to include an inaccurate Nov. 8 deadline.One Palm Beach Democratic activist said in an interview the idea was to have voters fix and submit as many absentee ballots as possible with the altered forms in hopes of later including them in vote totals if a judge ruled such ballots were allowed.
The Republican Party pointed out that the “Democrats successfully sued to extend the deadline after the fact.”
Democratic consultant Jake Sanders claimed he warned the staffers about using these forms and that no one discussed the legal issues of using altered forms.
An email from Jennifer Kim, the Democrat’s Central Florida deputy field director and deputy training director, wrote in her November 7 email that the “staffers should target people who submitted absentee vote-by-mail ballots before Election Day and did not sign them properly.”
Naples Daily News continued:
“The voters MUST print out the form and sign it by hand,” Kim wrote in the email that attached copies of the altered forms in both English and Spanish. The email also included a sheet with the contact information of all election supervisors in the state.Among those Democrats on Kim’s email was Joe Walters of Brandon, listed by the Nelson campaign as a recount contact.The document Kim attached to her email was an altered state form to fix an absentee ballot with signature problems. The altered form modified the original state document by replacing the deadline identified as “no later than 5 p.m. on the day before the election” with a new deadline “no later than 5 p.m. Thursday Nov. 8.”Kim’s email instructed staff and volunteers to use the list of voters to contact about their signature problems on the absentee ballots, to complete the form on the phone with the voter and to email the completed form to the voter.The voter was instructed to print the form and to sign it. And Kim’s email instructed the party workers to tell voters to deliver the signed form to their local election office.Kim told staffers that voters should reply back to them after they delivered the forms at the party’s email, vote@floridadems.org. That email was also included in documents Florida election officials referred to federal prosecutors in connection to the altered forms received by Broward and the other three counties.
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