The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled in favor of Brenda Snipes, former supervisor of Elections, Broward County. Courtey photo.

Former Broward County Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes properly maintained election rolls, the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Eleventh Circuit has ruled.

The ruling is a victory for Snipes, who defeated claims by the American Civil Rights Union, which alleged that she hadn't done enough.

The American Civil Rights Union's lawsuit, filed before the 2016 election, alleged Snipes had not tried hard enough to remove ineligible voters, including noncitizens, felons and the mentally incapacitated.

But the Eleventh Circuit disagreed, finding no evidence that Snipes violated the federal National Voter Registration Act, which requires state election officials to make reasonable attempts to remove ineligible voters. The opinion said that although the statute allows voters to be removed for felony convictions, it only mandates their removal if they've died or changed address.

"What ACRU really has asked us to do is rewrite the statute so as to treat all of the categories of ineligibility in the same way," the ruling said, later adding, "But we may not rewrite the unambiguous text, where Congress has been crystal clear in treating different categories of ineligibility in different ways."

Eleventh Circuit Judge Stanley Markus wrote the opinion, with Judges Britt Grant and Frank Hull concurring. The ruling upholds a final judgment from the trial court in favor of Snipes.

'New territory'

Logan Churchwell, spokesperson from the Public Interest Legal Foundation in Indiana, which represented the plaintiff, said it is weighing its next move.

"This is quite a novel case, and there just isn't an established road map for how these things go, as opposed to say a voting records fight under the same law," Churchwell said. "We're in new territory."

Churchwell claimed that his research uncovered a "wide menu of failures," including duplicate registrants, and children and dead people registered to vote in Broward.

ACRU's lead counsel, J. Christian Adams, served on President Donald Trumps' Commission on Election Integrity, which did not find evidence of widespread voter fraud and has since disbanded.

ACRU attorney Kaylan Phillips said the team applied a "commonsense understanding" of requirements for elections officials.

"This is not an area of law that has a breadth of courts opining, so what we have done is ask the court to apply the statute in a reasonable way," Phillips said.

Plaintiff counsel Churchwell said the ruling presents a question that stretches beyond this case.

"Are we just going to limit the concept to death and relocation, or are we going to take ownership of this issue and sweat every little detail? Because each one of these either strengthens or weakens our voting system," he said.

Snipes' attorneys, Burnadette Norris-Weeks and Michelle Pamies, said they were happy with the ruling.

"Beyond this, we're hopeful that the current supervisor of elections will continue to execute the same or a similar program to what's been done in the past by Brenda Snipes' office," said Norris-Weeks, of the Burnadette Norris-Weeks law firm in Fort Lauderdale. "We're hoping that it will not be any more aggressive, and cause there to be voter suppression."

Pamies also stressed the court found no merit in the plaintiff's claims that voter fraud occurred in Broward.

"In order for there to have been voter fraud, one person who died would have had to vote. There was no such allegation, nothing like that ever mentioned," Pamies said.

Gov. Jeb Bush appointed Snipes in 2003. She was suspended in 2018 by then-Gov. Rick Scott, who replaced her with Pete Antonacci. Snipes challenged the suspension with a lawsuit, but resigned after Gov. Ron DeSantis took office and suspended her a second time.

Read the court order:

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