Sean Campbell, the chief deputy to Clerk of Courts Mitch Needelman, said he has suspicions about the results of the primary election last week that ousted his boss and want the Supervisor of Elections Office to check into it. Former Clerk Scott Ellis won that election, getting 61 percent of the vote to Needelman’s 39 percent. Campbell said he fears that the vote-counting system may have been hacked, either from within the Supervisor of Elections Office or from the outside, and the results reported were not the actual vote totals. He wants election officials to hand-count ballots from three randomly selected precincts to double-check the accuracy of the reported totals. “I’m not accusing anybody,” Campbell said. “I’m just concerned. If the results are what they are, well, OK.”
Brevard Supervisor of Elections Lori Scott termed the allegations “very serious” and “disturbing,” adding that she has no indication of any inaccuracies in the primary election results. Scott said this is the first time she has heard such allegations in her four years in office, and if Campbell has any proof, he needs to bring it forward. “To allege anything like this is not only an insult to me, it’s an insult to the voters,” Scott said.
Campbell, who also was on Needelman’s campaign-steering committee, emphasized in an interview that he is making his request as an individual, not as a public employee and not on behalf of Needelman. Campbell said he has no specific proof that the results are wrong. He just is suspicious because the results differed so much from primary day polling done by the Needelman camp. Campbell said he also sees it as unusual that results from many of the individual precincts were consistent with the roughly 61 percent-to-39 percent margin reported countywide.
Full Article: Needelman campaign aide seeks recount, suspects hacking | FLORIDA TODAY | floridatoday.com.