Florida county rife with insecure, unsupervised ballots, whistleblower alleges
Ryan King
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A whistleblower from the Orange County Supervisor of Elections (SOE) in Orlando, Florida, is alleging the elections office lacks sufficient supervision of its ballots.
Brian Freid, the whistleblower who was terminated from his post as Information Systems Director last year, further alleges that the elections office flouts state laws overseeing the transportation of ballots and chain of custody. He outlined his accusations in a recent affidavit and fretted that the lack of proper oversight could be conducive to a heightened risk of voter fraud.
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Freid alleges that the Orange County SOE lacks a proper system for tracking the creation of ballots, supplies used in the creation of ballots, and storage of ballots in secure areas. Due to the lack of chain of custody, officials can “print an unlimited number of live ballots undetected either in the technical services area or offsite.”
“There is no management of ballot creation, ballot tracking, or the management of the thumb drives used to copy the ballot PDF’s [sic],” Freid’s affidavit filed with a local Florida Department of Law Enforcement office obtained by Just the News claims.
At one point, he noted that the thumb drives used to move the county’s voter database between tablets were often left in a tablet room that was not properly secured. The thumb drives “contain unredacted voter data for all voters, including protected voters,” and generally are not erased after being used, the affidavit alleges.
Freid allegedly observed vote-by-mail ballots being transported from the SOE office to the Post Office by “only one SOE employee or a single temporary worker.” Freid implied that this procedural deficiency could leave vote-by-mail ballots vulnerable to malfeasance and stressed that he “was unable to find any documented procedures or chain of custody forms of how many Vote by Mail ballots are sent out or picked up.”
In the affidavit, Freid cited a Florida statute that requires election facilities to have a proper “chain of custody of ballots, including a detailed description of procedures to create a complete written record of the chain of custody of ballots and paper outputs beginning with their receipt from a printer or manufacturer until such time as they are destroyed.”
Lastly, many of the rooms in Orange County SOE such as the tablet room, records vault, server room, and more, lack robust security measures such as proper locks and security cameras, Freid alleged.
“Most of these secure areas use old pin locks to secure the doors and the combinations for these locks have not been changed in many years. Most of the doors use the same combinations and are know[n] by most staff member[s] and many of the temporary workers,” the affidavit claims.
Freid describes himself as a lifelong Democrat, per Just the News. He claims to have been terminated from his post in the Orange County SOE last October after he urged the county to fire another official in the office, Bill Cowles, whom he blames for much of the alleged deficiencies in the country’s voting processes.
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The Washington Examiner contacted the Orange County SOE for comment.