With less than two weeks until the new Broward County Democratic Chair is elected, the current leadership of the Broward Democratic Party has provided very few details to the 800 Precinct Captains who will be voting.
Recently, Broward’s Democratic Precinct Captains learned of the place and time of the elections but were left hanging on other important information such as requirements to vote and notices of offices to be elected.
Over the years, Broward’s current Democratic Chair, Mitch Ceasar, has been bogged down with issues of appointing hand-picked Precinct Captains, voter tampering, allegations of sexual harassment, and last year, an alleged coverup which led to the arrest and felony charge of the treasurer of the Council of Club Presidents after money was stolen.
Hoping to avoid another debacle of the 2008 election involving alleged voter fraud READ: Chairman Ceasar and the Dirty Election, many Democrats have had enough and are making sure voters aren’t purged, and ballots don’t go missing by Mitch Ceasar and other committee members, so that they can remain at the helm of Broward’s Democratic Party.
Mitch Ceasar’s sister is married to Diane Glasser’s son. Glasser is the DEC State Committee Woman and Tamarac City Commissioner.
Randy Fleischer, attorney and Democratic Area Leader who has been involved in Democratic Executive Committee (DEC) elections since 1996, is requesting the State Party take a more significant role to ensure that the ballots are correctly numbered, distributed, counted, and secured as well as that the chain of custody of the votes is maintained for review.
Fleischer represented a large group of DEC members who believed that the election that was held in 2008 was not fairly run.
“I included pictures that clearly evidenced cheating in the election and violations of procedures, in addition to affidavits testifying to violations of the election rules, including having all the ballots disappear after the election and evidence that extra ballots were printed,” said Fleischer.
“I am very concerned that this election will also be subject to violations of procedure and that the election is skewed to reelect Mitch Ceasar and Tamarac Commissioner Diane Glasser, as have past elections.”
Andrew Markoff is a Precinct Captain, which gives him one of the 800 votes on December 9th. He believes that the process for choosing a Chair is very similar to allowing American prisoners to vote for President.
“Voters will vote for whoever will give them the keys to the jailhouse door, and DEC voters supporting Mitch Ceasar will vote for those ‘gifts’ Mitt Romney had talked about. The process for electing the leadership of the DEC is obviously dysfunctional. Ceasar supporters in Broward are too often more concerned with their ability to use their position in the local party to generate consulting fees from candidates rather than being concerned about having a functional DEC. At least that’s my impression.”
Markoff believes people should be outraged about how Ceasar operates and raise their expectations about how observers and operatives should react to that outrage.
“If few or if none of us have any expectation that there will be consequences for rule violations, then what is the point? How can we have a political party, especially called the ‘Democratic Party’ that does not even run a fair and observable DEC election?”