Orange elections supervisor foils fake ballot in Orlando’s election
Of more than 12,000 ballots cast in Orlando’s city council elections last week, one vote caught the attention of the Supervisor of Elections office when it was rejected by a vote-counting machine.
Upon further review, it mostly looked like any other ballot. It was marked with a number identifying it as being from the Rock Lake Community Center precinct. It was laid out identically to official ballots with correct fonts and spellings and listed the names of current candidates.
What it did not have were exact matching bar codes that line the perimeter of an official ballot. The combination of lines and black boxes unique to each election tells a voting machine how to scan an official ballot. This particular ballot, deemed fake by Supervisor of Election Bill Cowles’ office, had incorrect markings, and only on the top and bottom instead of all four sides. It also was printed on lighter-weight paper, Cowles confirmed with the company that does the office’s printing.
The canvassing board tasked with certifying the election, decided not to allow the single ballot to be counted in the District 5 race, determining it was an impostor, he said this week.
“I’ve never seen somebody go out and create a ballot to the extent that this one looks like a regular ballot,” said Cowles, who has overseen elections in Orange County since 1996.
Its creator remains a mystery. Cowles conceded the person likely won’t be identified, in part due to efforts to protect voters’ privacy during the counting process.
For a vote to be counted, signatures on the envelope must match the one the elections office has on file. Once an elections worker confirms a match, the ballot is separated from its envelope for counting, and to keep private for whom the voter cast the ballot, Cowles said.
On the problem ballot, the signatures matched, confirming the person was a registered and eligible voter. However, by the time the ballot was flagged as an issue by a counting machine, the envelope was grouped with all of the others, making matching them back up impossible, Cowles said.
The precinct number printed on the document provides another clue. However, the Rock Lake Community Center had 551 total votes returned by mail at the office on Kaley Street.
City Commissioner Patty Sheehan, who served on the canvassing board, said she too had never seen anything like it.
“It was clearly not a proper ballot,” said Sheehan, who has been on numerous canvassing boards over her 21 years on the city council. “It looked like it was meant to be nefarious.”
It’s not out of the ordinary for the supervisor to receive puzzling ballots. Sometimes a ballot is left blank or is marked for both candidates. In this recent round of city races, somebody mailed a completed sample ballot and, because the voter was identified and eligible, the canvassing board voted to count it.
But this one was unique.
The unofficial ballot was marked for Shaniqua Rose, the District 5 candidate who lost to incumbent Regina Hill. While it wouldn’t have changed the result — Hill won by more than 1,000 votes — Rose says she wants Cowles to investigate further to ensure it wasn’t part of a larger scheme.
“There weren’t that many ballots that came in,” she said. “It seemed intentional.”
Cowles said he’s limited in what he can do, as without the envelope, he can’t identify the voter or narrow down when his office received the ballot in the mail.
“Even if I turned it over to [the Florida Department of Law Enforcement] or the State Attorney, I can’t give them the information they need,” he said.
He said that because the vote wasn’t counted, it’s proof that state and county election systems are secure, and that they’re prepared to catch tricks.
“The positive is the system caught it,” Cowles said. “I think it validates that the procedures we’re doing here on returns.”
