Florida County Election Office Allowed Unsupervised Ballot Printing, Whistleblower Alleges

A whistleblower, who previously worked for the Orange County Supervisor of Elections Bill Cowles in Orlando, Florida, has claimed that the elections office did not provide adequate ballot supervision in the lead-up to the 2022 midterm election.

Whistleblower Brian Freid filed two affidavits alleging that the election office lacked proper oversight over the printing, management, and storage of live ballots for the election.

The first affidavit filed on Nov. 17, 2022, includes allegations that election personnel improperly created and handled thumb drives that contained unredacted voter information.

Freid further alleged the use of pirated technology on employee computers and the “improper and potentially illegal” use of special administrative privileges that allowed access to employee computers, emails, Supervisor of Elections (SOE) office systems, network data, and voter signatures.

Fried said he became aware of these issues in March of 2022, ahead of the primary elections held in November of that year.

Freid worked at the Orange County election office as the information systems director until he was fired in October after he called for another election employee to be fired and refused to stop investigating whether that employee exfiltrated election data.

Freid told NTD News that this particular employee had 13 pieces of pirated software, each of which could form the basis for a potential felony charge. Freid declined to name the employee that had the pirated software.

Freid filed a second affidavit on Dec. 22, further alleging he became aware of additional election security concerns in July.

In this second complaint,  he alleged a lack of security and oversight over areas of an SOE warehouse where ballots were created and stored, as well as the location of a server for a BlueCrest mail ballot sorting system.

In the programming room where ballots are created as a PDF file, loaded onto a thumb drive, and then printed, Freid said “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 said the server closet with the server that manages the mail sorting system is also “easily accessible by many fulltime and part time employees” as is the records vault where “live ballots and voted ballots” are stored.

Freid has passed on both of his whistleblower complaints to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE).

NTD News reached out to FDLE but did not receive a response before the time of publication.

Freid also described a general lack of chain of custody over ballots. He said he was unable to find any documented procedures or chain of custody forms to document how many mailed ballots were sent out or picked up and returned.

In his affidavit, Fried said, “I was unable to find any documented procedures or tracking of information on who transported Vote by Mail ballots, when they were transported, what form of transportation was used (office van or box truck), how long the delivery took or how many were taken to the post office” as well as “who retrieved Vote by Mail ballots, when they were picked up, what form of transportation was used (office van or box truck), how long the process took or how many were retrieved from the post office.”

Freid said the lack of chain of custody could violate a Florida law for chain of custody documents to include “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” and “a description of the method and equipment used and a detailed list of the names of all individuals involved” to transport ballots.