Election complaint filed by Republican Rocky Rochford, who lost to Kathy Castor in CD-14 race

Since Donald Trump’s victory in both the Electoral College and the popular vote last month, there haven’t been as many complaints about a “rigged election” as there were at this time in 2020. That doesn’t mean that every Republican in Florida believes everything was on the up and up when it came to counting all the votes.

Take Robert “Rocky” Rochford, a U.S. Navy veteran who was the GOP candidate in Florida’s 14th Congressional District. He lost decisively on Nov. 5 to Democratic incumbent Kathy Castor, who won her 10th term in office by more than 15 points. The district encompasses parts of Hillsborough and Pinellas County.

But Rochford doesn’t believe the election was fairly adjudicated and filed a lawsuit last week citing “substantial” irregularities “sufficient enough to change the results of the election.”

The case, filed in Leon County Circuit Court, seeks an independent investigation into the administration of vote-by-mail ballots. Rochford also wants the court to nullify the certification of the election and to order a new election.

The complaint revolves around applications for vote-by-mail ballots in both Hillsborough and Pinellas counties. The suit says that in Pinellas County alone on Sept. 9, 198,166 vote-by-mail requests were “dumped” into the system, and that those requests were made with the Voter Fraud Protection System “turned off or somehow overridden.”

The suit goes on to allege that 37,495 requests for vote-by-mail ballots were accepted despite the fact that the voters did not provide a driver’s license number, Florida voter ID number, or the last four digits of a Social Security Number — a legal requirement since passage of a 2021 electoral reform bill (SB 90).

“We are starting to dig into the 198,166 supposed voters to see how many of them were dead, gone, or unqualified when they voted,” said Deerfield Beach attorney Peter Ticktin, representing Rochford in the lawsuit.

Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Julie Marcus, Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Craig Latimer, and Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd are listed as defendants, as are the canvassing boards for Pinellas and Hillsborough. The Florida Elections Canvassing Commission and Rep. Castor are also named as defendants.

None of those defendants responded to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Hillsborough County supervisor of elections said that that office does not comment on pending litigation.

‘Too big to rig’

In an interview with Ticktin on Monday night, the attorney alleged an organized attempt to cheat in the election through mail-in ballots, adding, “We can show this happened in every county in Florida.”

“We’re not sure that this happened in other states at this point, but we see that all of the candidates lost either 2 to 1, 3 to 1, or 4 to 1 in every county of Florida, and we’re talking about [Rick] Scott and Donald Trump [both of whom won the state by 13 percentage points]. They lost the mail-in votes by a large margin, and the only reason that they were able to win the state was because it was just too big to rig.”

While registered Republicans voted in larger numbers than Democrats on Election Day and in early voting, 211,285 more Democrats than Republicans voted by mail this year, according to the Florida Division of Elections. In 2022, 193,628 more Democrats voted by mail than Republicans; in 2020, 683,487 more Democrats than Republicans voted by mail, putting into question whether there was anything out of the ordinary that Democrats outvoted Republicans in that particular voting method.

Ticktin speculates about what he thinks took place.

“They [Republicans] had so many people pouring out that it overwhelmed the numbers that were in the mail-in votes,” he said.

“So the question is: Were the mail-in votes done by some forces-that-be, some people who came into the system and basically somehow were able to put in the voter registrations and then the requests for ballots of people that are either dead, moved out of that country and are voting somewhere else, or are people that are just not citizens? So, what scenario could there be? And the scenario that we suspect … is that non-citizens were listed, and their names and identification were used.”

‘Big logical leaps’

That scenario seems not necessarily backed up by the evidence at hand, said Brad Ashwell, with the voting rights group All Voting is Local Florida. After reviewing the lawsuit, he suggested the Rochford group is “making a lot of big logical leaps — a lot of causal connections that just might not be there at all.”

“All these assertions seem thin and far-fetched, and they fit squarely into a fraud narrative that anti-voter forces have been spinning ever since the 2020 election,” Ashwell continued.

“The more likely scenario is that voters made their voices heard and chose a different candidate. I guess we’ll see how the lawsuit pans out but, from our perspective, our election officials work tirelessly regardless of their party affiliation to ensure a safe and fair election, and they deserve our respect and gratitude, not baseless accusations targeting them.”

Ashwell noted that the documents in question were just for requests for ballots. “These are not the ballots that are being returned,” he said. “That’s very different.”

“No vote-by-mail issued on a day in which there was a breakdown in internal controls can be considered valid because the first control in place, requesting and providing identification, was not present,” the lawsuit claims. “This amounts to a total of approximately 122,971 compromised vote-by-mail ballots, of which approximately 96,188 were voted on. This not only had a material impact on the election results but were probably the determining factor of the election.”