A fair re-count is now impossible in Florida because of voting irregularities, President Donald Trump said, adding that “infected” ballots have corrupted the vote tally to the point that the election must be called using the election night tallies instead.
“The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!” the president tweeted on Monday.
The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2018
Trump: end recount now
Trump’s statement echoed a concern among many conservatives in and outside of Florida, who fear that even if voting irregularities are cleaned up and bad election officials are fired, invalid votes have already been mixed into the tally. Voting irregularities have already up-ended three state-wide races.
One week after the election, Broward and Palm Beach counties have become ground zero of an intense post-election fight as three state-wide races have fallen within the .5 percent margins for a mandatory machine re-count. Passions are high as both sides exchange lawsuits and accusations of election fraud and conspiracy mongering.
Republicans have watched with dismay as Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis and Senate candidate Rick Scott gradually lost their comfortable election night leads over their opponents after election officials started counting late ballots in the days after Election Day last week. As of Sunday night, Scott had a slim lead over Democrat incumbent Bill Nelson of about 13,000 votes and DeSantis led Democrat Andrew Gillum by 33,000 votes as of Saturday. Gillum entered the race again on Sunday after having initially conceded on Election Night.
Liberals who spent the last two years claiming that Russia stole the 2016 election have taken to accusing Republicans of encouraging baseless theories of election theft, but Republicans say they are eager to restore accountability and transparency to a shadowy process. Scott has been leading a legal charge to nip election fraud in bud, filing a batch of lawsuits Sunday against the two counties for “willful disregard of the law” for not counting votes in a timely manner and mixing up invalid ballots with legal ones. He has also filed suit to disregard any votes counted after a Saturday deadline.
The shady business in the two counties led Scott to file an initial salvo of lawsuits on Thursday and claim that “unethical liberals” were trying to “steal” elections in Florida. Scott also called on Sunday for inactive voting machines and ballots to be “impounded” until the recount is done, prompting Democrats to call him a “Latin American dictator.” His request was denied by a judge and a compromise was reached to post three deputies in the Broward County election supervisor’s office.
For his part, Nelson sued on Monday Florida’s secretary of state to count mail-in ballots that were delivered after Election Day.
Election heist underway?
The deadline for the re-count is Thursday, but it’s anybody’s guess when Florida will get its act together. It could take much longer — long enough, Republicans worry, to invert the results. Palm Beach County’s elections supervisor has already warned that she doesn’t think they’ll be done in time.
While liberals accuse Scott, Trump, and others of encouraging conspiracy theories, the surfacing of new ballots days after the election is mysterious and troubling. Brenda Snipes, the election supervisor in charge of counting ballots in Broward, has been dodgy and evasive about the process and has a history of mismanaging elections, including illegally destroying ballots and opening ballots in private.
Snipes has admitted to mixing up at least 22 rejected absentee ballots with a batch of 205 valid ones. Meanwhile, irregularities continue to pile up throughout Florida.
The chance of an election heist has brought Republicans together. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) played an important role in drawing attention to the voting irregularities in Florida on Twitter, and former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who was accused of helping his brother George steal the recount in 2000, joined former rival Trump in calling for Snipes’ removal.
Meanwhile, the Democrats have been eager to shut down any suggestion of wrongdoing. Nelson called on Scott to recuse himself from the recount process and said that his opponent is “worried that when all votes are counted he’ll lose the election,” echoing a common accusation among liberals concerning the recount: that conservatives are clinging to a conspiracy theory because they are afraid to lose in a full count. Gillum responded to Scott by saying that a full count — even a dreadfully slow one occurring under incredibly shadowy circumstances — is “democracy” and that Republicans are desperate to suppress the vote.
You sound nervous.#CountEveryVote https://t.co/9kRvTqUmwM
— Andrew Gillum (@AndrewGillum) November 12, 2018
But the real reason conservatives are concerned is that they fear that Democrats could get away with an election heist amidst a smog of confusion as the process drags on.
Trump is right: the Democrats shouldn’t get away with this. The recount needs to end now.
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