This is the same office who was just accused of illegally opening mail in ballots.
Broward SOE opening ballots
It now makes sense why they have to open the ballots, once they have been opened, and counted, they can't contest the ballot, and discard it.
What is the remedy here? IMHO, they need to start calling everyone who requested a mail-in ballot, and ask if they received it. If they have a certain number of people that have had their ballots counted, but did not receive them, you need to exclude them from the election. The only way to do that, since the mail-in ballots have been joined with the early vote ballots, would be to nullify all mail-in and early vote ballots!
If this is true, they intentionally made it impossible to exclude mail-in ballots from in-person ballots! That is why the law says they can't open mail-in ballots until they have been canvased exists in the first place! People NEED to go to jail for this!
On the upside, it gives me a little more faith in the amount of electronic voting machine fraud. If it was that easy to commit fraud on the electronic machines, why go to the trouble of the mail-in ballot fraud?