Jacquet, who, like Powell, once worked as a legislative aide for Bernard, lost at the polls to opponent Edwin Ferguson by 132 votes, but topped Ferguson in mail-in ballots by 1,167.
The two candidates, “working together,” both received almost half of their votes from mail-in ballots.
— It seems likely that ballots were requested without the knowledge of voters. Paul Beach County Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher identified at least 300 ballot request forms that were possibly fraudulent, but she said she didn’t have any choice but to send ballots to voters.
— Barnard and Jacquet utilized daily updates sent by the elections office saying when ballots had been sent to voters. That allowed them to direct their campaign workers to those homes when ballots were hitting mailboxes. This, despite the fact that a Miami-Dade grand jury found in 2012 that campaigns ought not to be given that information because of the potential for fraud.
— After mail-in ballots were signed and sealed, voters told the Post they gave them to candidates or their campaign workers to take to the elections office (think California-style “ballot harvesting”), which disrupted the chain of custody.
It should be noted, according to the Post, that campaigns have sought out absentee voters and collected their ballots “for years,” but election lawyers, prosecutors, campaign strategists, and even a former Florida Supreme Court chief justice have all “roundly condemned” the practice of helping voters fill out ballots.
“That’s just a stupid thing for a candidate to do,” Gerald Kogan, who served on the Sunshine States’s high court for more than a decade. “Why on Earth would a candidate have to go into somebody’s house and watch them fill out a ballot?”
In both cases involving Bernard and Jacquet, in-person vote counts went to their opponents but mail-in balloting heavily favored them:
Bernard’s chief county commission opponent, incumbent Priscilla Taylor, had 768 more votes among people who went to the polls, but Bernard’s 1,287 absentee-vote edge put him over the top.
Jacquet, who, like Powell, once worked as a legislative aide for Bernard, lost at the polls to opponent Edwin Ferguson by 132 votes, but topped Ferguson in mail-in ballots by 1,167.
The two candidates, “working together,” both received almost half of their votes from mail-in ballots.