Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently suspended the elected, Constitutional Officer, the Supt. of Elections, Gina McDowell (Democrat), for Liberty County, FL based upon an FDLE investigation where she was shown to have taken over $40,000 in taxpayer funds for personal use.
- The suspension was due to financial fraud and not voter or election fraud issues.
- The accused official was a DEMOCRAT.
- The Supt. of Elections ran her own accounting systems. Florida does not require an independent office provide accounting or other services, thus she controlled all transactions.
- The Supt. of Elections DID have an annual financial audit by a long time auditor who never found anything until this year due to excess credit card charges.
- This situation illustrates my (FiscalRangers.com) constant lament that Florida Constitutional officers have no significant oversight. They control everything rather than use another independent office like the Court Clerk (who magically is also a Constitutional Officer and part of the "club"). Legislation needs to be changed to boost oversight of Constitutionals and require cycled performance audits also.
- My Google search this morning (May 6) found they had suppressed all articles appearing in searches, but now they are back.
- The Liberty County Board Chair told me the Governor had a team working on the issue and would make an emergency appointment to replace the accused Supt. of Elections. I have not been able to get anyone in the Governor's staff to answer the phones yet.
Liberty County is just west of Tallahassee. There were two or three articles that appeared when I did a Google search yesterday on "DeSantis Suspends Liberty County, FL Supt. of Elections" such as THIS ONE.
See Updates Below
Then, today (May 6, 2020), when I searched to see if more reports were published, GOOGLE HAD SUPPRESSED ALL NEWS OF THE FRAUD and I could not find any mention of it, even by trying different search phrases.
BUT, I went to the Microsoft search engine Bing, and voila, many articles including AP popped up.
Liberty County is the smallest population County in Florida with only 8800 residents and a County budget of only $5.1-million. Their website has errors in it, and the budget is in an Excel spreadsheet, so they are not very sophisticated but still have to cope with all the regulations the larger counties do.
So, this Google suppression of the news, perhaps was implemented because it showed DeSantis taking a positive action on the fraud, or because Google doesn't want any news of corrupt election officials or because the accused is a Democrat. The County is MORE Democrat than Republican.
I will follow up on 1) what happens to the corrupt Elections Supervisor, and 2) what investigation takes place to implement more strict transparency and oversight on ALL Constitutional Officers.
The accused, Gina McDowell (Democrat), was running for re-election and the Facebook page for the Elections Supervisor HERE shows there are several other candidates running for her office (and her name is still there).
Update: Today, May 6, 2020, a search on Google again finds the articles.
I also talked by phone to Board Chair Dewayne Branch and he said the Governor's office had a team working on it and would make an emergency appointment to replace the accused. He also said that the Supt. of Elections was also completely independent in doing their own accounting and finance. The Court Clerk / Comptroller is not involved. I talked to the Court Clerk / Comptroller Kathleen Brown who confirmed she has no oversight or responsibility for Constitutional officers. I then asked Brown who did the annual audit of the Elections Supt. and she said they did have a long time auditor, but apparently, after many years, he finally found evidence of the fraud from a higher volume of credit card charges.
I did tell the Board Chair that the Board needs to protect the credibility of the County by launching their own investigation and sharing it with local residents to ensure the bad actions of one Constitutional Officer do not impune the rest of the County.
Vance Jochim
FiscalRangers.com
