Ron DeSantis says he would have dumped Brenda Snipes if she hadn’t resigned

Shortly after Broward County Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes submitted her office’s official numbers in Florida’s hand recount Sunday afternoon, she announced her resignation from office, effective in January.

That’s a good thing, says Florida Governor-Elect Ron DeSantis, who told Fox News Monday that if she hadn’t done so, he would have terminated her when he takes office in January.

“There was no way as governor I was going to let her preside over another election down there after all the problems that they had,” DeSantis said on “Fox and Friends.”

Under Snipes’ leadership, Broward County has had a number of problems over the years.

According to reporting by South Florida media outlets;

• Two years ago, her office illegally destroyed more than 6,000 ballots that were properly recorded during the election – the problem was that the ballots were supposed to be kept on file for a certain period, and she got rid of them too soon.
• Last week her office submitted the results of a machine recount two minutes past the deadline.
• Over the weekend she admitted that her office had lost 2,000 ballots during the machine recount.

For Democrats, perhaps her biggest mistake was her office’s ballot listings – a flawed design that may have made the difference in the U.S. Senate race between Rick Scott and Bill Nelson.

The U.S. Senate race had a position on the ballot that was in the corner, beneath a column of the ballot instructions. Apparently tens of thousands of voters overlooked it. Nelson lost the Senate race by 10,033 votes out of 8.2 million cast.

On his Fox and Friends interview, DeSantis said “obviously” the state will need to address election problems, particularly in Broward and Palm Beach counties.

DeSantis also gave credit to his vanquished Democratic opponent, Andrew Gillum, who conceded for a second time in the race on Saturday night.

“No one thought he could win the Democratic primary, but if you watched him, he out-debated all those people,” DeSantis said. “He was the only one that inspired anybody with enthusiasm, and I think that the fact that he was their nominee, he was really responsible for driving a lot of these Democrats to vote who don’t normally vote in midterm elections, so it was a tough fight.”

Gillum made his own national TV appearance Sunday on MSNBC.

The Tallahassee mayor noted DeSantis’ narrow victory, and said that if DeSantis wants to truly be a governor of all the people of the state of Florida, “that means he’s going to have to make some outreaches, that he’s going to have to show some willingness to lean into some of the issues that we talked about,” referring specifically to Medicaid expansion and raising teacher salaries.

Gillum also expressed his disappointment with DeSantis’s selecting Northwest Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz for the governor’s transition team, since Gaetz’ selected Charles C. Johnson – a Holocaust denier and an open supporter of neo-Nazi causes- to be his guest at President Trump’s state of the union address earlier this year.