Brevard County Election Irregularities
Lots of smoke, is there a fire?
I ran as a Democratic Candidate for The Brevard County Commission in District 4 in 2018. It is an overwhelmingly Republican district, and I saw the absence of a Democratic Candidate in that race as a good opportunity to stretch my political legs so to speak. Despite the loss, I over-performed which I’m very proud of.
I want to be very clear, I do not think that its possible I somehow won that race, nor am I claiming to be the victim of election or voting fraud. My object in writing this is to simply highlight a broader pattern of stunning corruption in my County, along with a documented pattern of low level disenfranchisement that has gone on unaddressed. My hope is this will be used as an information resource to improve equitable voting access and increase transparency and accountability in our voting processes.
- Brevard Corruption and our Crazy Congressman
- Supervisor of Elections, Russian Hacking, 2018 Election
- By The Numbers
- Conclusion
Brevard Corruption and our Crazy Congressman(background)
Brevard County has many significant connections to much of the corrupt political activity taking place in FL. Without writing a book on it(which I probably will in the future) this is a pretty good list of resources to get an idea of what the politics here looks like. Our Congressman is the senior elected official for the Republican Party here. The GOP had a near monopoly on elected offices in the county following the 2016 election.
Starting near the top and looking back a ways:
Steve Crisafulli and Mike Haridopolis are both former Brevard County reps who held top jobs in the Legislature.
Back in 2011 The GOP got together after electing Rick Scott and spared no effort to gerrymander our state:
“After assuming the Senate presidency, Mike Haridopolos, R-Merritt Island, declared this past winter that he had saved taxpayers more than $1 million by laying off senior Senate staffers and consolidating their jobs…Buried within the $69.67 billion budget agreed to this week, the Senate is giving itself a 26 percent spending boost — more than $9 million above last year — to finance the coming legal fight.”
In 2015:
After lawsuits and court rulings determined that the congressional maps were unconstitutional, 5 years later the Legislature refused to redraw equitable maps.
“House Speaker Steve Crisafulli on Tuesday all but ruled out a special session to take another stab at drawing new districts for Florida’s congressional delegation, making it increasingly likely that the task will fall to the courts.”
Steve Crisafulli was just named by our Commission to represent Brevard in the Redistricting process this year:
“But a vote for committee chair — which ultimately elected well-connected political consultant and former Florida House Speaker Steve Crisafulli — raised some eyebrows when nominations were closed before members could offer up alternate candidates."
Currently, these two men are lobbyists and they’re raking in the dough:
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Our Sheriff is a very high profile character in national politics, some call him the “New Joe Arpaio". He is a member of the “Constitutional Sheriff’s Association” which believes in the sovereign supremacy of the sheriff’s office in any given county over law enforcement matters. In 2016, he was awarded with the National Rifle Association of America Defender of Freedom Award.
He spins a wheel of fortune to see which 'fugitives' his department is after. Most of these people are low-level drug offenders, turns out many were not fugitives at the time of their appearance on his show:
In addition to this, a scandal involving the wrongful death of a veteran in the jail has led to multiple lawsuits, and the very irregular charging of that man’s widow in their sons drowning death:
“Eiglarsh expressed disbelief that State Attorney Phil Archer pursued the charge following the Sheriff’s Office investigation into the child’s death, and said he had provided exculpatory evidence to Archer to consider."
Our State Attorney does not file elections charges against people:
Wayne Ivey ignores Hatch Act and stands “shoulder to shoulder" with Trump on tarmac in Tampa:
“Ivey: Hatch Act Violation" https://link.medium.com/7W5LTCmmdib
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2955578624729747&id=100008329158870
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A racketeering scandal and investigation led to a very wide ranging investigation into local political corruption:
Even after that investigation became public and arrests were made, the conflicts of interest continued in broad daylight:
One of our state representatives is deeply connected to the gambling industry, the people involved in the Racketeering case were senior members of his campaign team, and his fraudulent behavior is well documented at length here:
“Corrupt State Rep. Randy Fine" https://link.medium.com/5lVgbBuG6hb
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=3007643769523232&id=100008329158870
Brevard County Commissioner is a former roommate of Matt Gaetz:
Write-in candidate closes Tobia-Meehan County Commission primary election to non-Republicans, is the stepson of former Florida Rep. Ritch Workman, who now is Tobia’s director of community affairs.
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Our Congressman Bill Posey’s breathtaking willingness to engage in peddling conspiracy theories:
2020 elections:
-November 22, 2020
-December 12, 2020
“U.S. Rep. Bill Posey doesn’t regularly make the rounds of TV talk shows like some of his Florida congressional counterparts. But he’s somewhat quietly become the leading voice here to call for investigations into the 2020 election.”
-Jan 6, 2021
‘Election Observers'
https://posey.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=396835
Most recently:
-July 14, 2021
NSA Spying on Tucker Carlson
https://posey.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=396940
His private thoughts on the Mueller Report(spoiler alert: he never read the f’n thing)
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Obama’s birth certificate:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bill-posey-wont-give-up-b_n_246300
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Election Security Legislation:
“And after the controversy surrounding the 2000 Presidential election, Posey sponsored and passed legislation to reform and modernize Florida’s election process by requiring counties to replace their punch card ballot system with optical scanners, set new election recount standards and better educate voters and poll workers."
https://posey.house.gov/about-bill/default.aspx
Congressman Bill Posey’s complete lack of desire to have any election security is troubling:
“Even in this hour of extreme partisanship and troubling isolationism, 69 times Posey’s Republican colleagues stepped up to sponsor these bills, sending a strong message to Moscow. Posey has not signed on to a single one, nor has he authored any of his own solutions to foreign interference in our democracy.”
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In addition to this, Russia’s footprint here is unknown to me in any detail, but with the presence of the Space Program, we can be sure there is an operationally and technically capable one.
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A short and entertaining video of our Congressman:
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The conclusion to be drawn from this background info is that Brevard does have a high-tech Russian footprint here set amid a blanket of local corruption, a dearth of accountability, top level electioneering people, and an insurrectionist for a Congressperson.
Brevard is #1!…(for capitol rioters)
https://thespacecoastrocket.com/brevard-county-fl-1-in-the-nation-for-capitol-riots-arrests/
Supervisor of Elections, Russian Hacking, 2018 Election
In 2017, Lori Scott sent a notice to voters.
“Scott also said in her "important notice to voters" that "our election tabulation system is a closed system, with no direct access to the internet.”
Turns out, that wasnt true:
“VR Systems, based in Tallahassee but with customers in eight states, used what’s known as remote-access software to connect for several hours to a central computer in Durham County, N.C."
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/05/vr-systems-russian-hackers-2016-1505582
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In 2018, I filed to run as a candidate for the County Commission here. In the process of gathering and submitting qualifying petitions, I ran right up to the deadline, had 291 petitions rejected arbitrarily, came up 23 petitions short despite turning in 1175 petitions(>907), and was denied an opportunity to challenge those individual petition decisions. (1% of registered voters in district. ~90k voters, 907 petitions from voters within the district were required to avoid filing fee. I ended up paying the filing fee.)
In my attempts to review and challenge the invalidated petitions, I was denied on an arbitrary basis, I appealed for an independent review, the state Division of Elections refused to be of assistance, and several of the emails detailing my requests for review disappeared from my inbox. I do still have some of them:
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Also in the same district in 2018, a write-in candidate closed the Republican primary in an overwhelmingly Republican district, essentially attempting to disenfranche non-republican voters from participating. This factored into my decision to run, because voters deserve to be able to vote.
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Mueller Report:
First, it was 1 county. Then it was 2. Then it was 4. Now it’s idk how many, but wtf means Welcome to Florida.
“At least 1"
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/18/fbi-russians-hacked-florida-vote-mueller-report-1281159
“2 Counties"
“4 counties"
“A few months after the Mueller report came out in 2019, a Senate intelligence report was released that suggested that Russians had penetrated up to four supervisor of elections offices.”
From the Mueller Report:
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VR Systems provided services in all but 3 of Florida’s counties.
“Pollbooks, unlike voting machines, do not undergo federal testing and certification and have no uniform standards governing their design or security…Kremlin-linked hackers attempted to breach the network of at least one U.S. e-pollbook provider in 2016, according to a leaked NSA(see: Reality Winner)document.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/31/election-security-hole-406471
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From the Isnardi Racketeering probe:
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2018 Recount in FL
I attempted to help with “ballot curing" which happened in the days after voting in 2018. The recounts were coming, and there is a short window of time to get provisional ballots “cured" where they had been rejected because of signatures not matching. When I went to our supervisor of elections office, we were denied access to those ballots on the basis that they had to be certified first, but that the certification would not take place until after the deadline to return “cured" ballots. I recorded on video my interaction with the SOE office:
https://m.facebook.com/groups/2203156589915454/permalink/2247536482144131/
My recording and publishing that video was called “cowardly" by our S.O.E., Lori Scott. Her assertion that the “public record" didn’t exist, is a reference to the provisional ballots in their possession which needed signature cures. The “if" part is referring to the fact that under state law the provisional ballots are not “public record" until they are certified.
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The 2018 election and recount here in FL was fn crazy. Obviously, the statistical probability that those 3 races would all come in so close is practically nill. The irregularities and suppression tactics employed by republicans are too numerous to try to list here. My opinion is that the GOP has about 4–6% cheat margin baked into the statewide elections, and democrats broke their system with record turnout. Rick Scott hollering that he was going to send in the national guard if they kept counting ballots in S. FL was priceless.
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In 2020, issues still not resolved:
“It has been asserted that voting machines are not vulnerable to remote hacking because they are never connected to the Internet, but both the premise and the conclusion are false,”
https://www.govtech.com/security/experts-florida-voting-machines-ripe-for-foreign-hackers.html
According to the Florida Department of State, Brevard County used ES&S machines in 2020:
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I think the fact that ES&S is registered at “John Galt Blvd.” is both hilarious, and suspicious. Ayn Rand and all that…
https://dos.myflorida.com/elections/voting-systems/certified-voting-systems-and-vendors/
By the numbers
I haven’t done a statistical analysis to try to sift through local disparities or anomalies. That rabbit hole is for professionals to jump into with their data analysis computer programs. I hope someone does.
Conclusion
There’s a lot of circumstantial proof that something more significant than widespread local corruption is wrong in Brevard, but this compilation of facts, which is the best I’m able to render, all amounts to lots of smoke without more substantial and definitive analysis which I don’t have the resources to provide. Certainly the connection between VR Systems being phished, and that software’s data connections to centralized voting systems across state lines is worth exploring. Additionally, the Russian connection here, top level electioneering people being from here, and our Congressman’s disposition would combine to suggest a higher than normal likelihood that the county which experts “can’t identify" is in fact Brevard.
I got 5 bucks on it.
I think the key question is, “what is the link between VR Systems, and ES&S software?”
One last thing, I almost forgot:
Trump held his very first rally as president in 2017 in the hangar at our Melbourne(FL) Airport that was being leased by the Russians.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4793648/president-trumps-campaign-2020-rally-melbourne-florida
Also present at our small international airport:
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Presidential_Airways,_Inc.
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-Matt
