Rick Scott is suing the election supervisors in Broward County and Palm Beach County.
By Joe Raedle/Getty Images.
On Friday morning, days after gleefully reading aloud from a list of failed Republican candidates who’d declined his endorsement, Donald Trump delved once again into state politics. “If you look at Broward County, they have had a horrible history,” he told reporters on the South Lawn, referring to Florida’s second-most-populous county, which tends to swing Democratic. “You see the people, and they were involved in the fraud of the fake dossier, the phony dossier, and I guess I hear they were somehow involved with the GPS Fusion people,” he continued. “Bad things have gone on in Broward Country, really bad things . . . he easily won, but every hour it seems to be going down. I think that people have to look at it very, very cautiously.”
Even as the president ranted, state officials in Florida were scrambling to tally mail-in and provisional ballots that have significantly narrowed the margins of victory for Republicans Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis, against Democrats Bill Nelson and Andrew Gillum, respectively. As of Thursday, per The Miami Herald, Senate candidates Scott and Nelson were separated by just 0.18 percentage points, and gubernatorial hopefuls DeSantis and Gillum by just 0.44. Under state law, any election with an initial margin of less than 0.5 percent merits a machine recount; if the margin is less than 0.25 percent, the recount must be manual. Broward also showed inconsistency in its support for Nelson compared with the rest of the state—soon after polls closed, consultants and journalists noticed that the county had 3.7 percent more votes for governor than Senator, an anomaly some suggested could be due to the placement of the Senate race box on the ballot.
As the clock winds down in Florida—both mail-in and provisional ballots must be submitted within 12 days of the election to be counted—Republicans are doing everything they can to gum up the works. Trump’s rant was seemingly inspired, in part, by Marco Rubio, who posted a lengthy Twitter thread on Thursday, suggesting that Democrats were attempting to skew results. “Now democrat lawyers are descending on #Florida. They have been very clear they aren’t here to make sure every vote is counted,” he wrote. “They are here to change the results of election; & #Broward is where they plan to do it.” He went on to impugn Broward elections supervisor Brenda Snipes: “A U.S. Senate seat & a statewide cabinet officer are now potentially in the hands of an elections supervisor with a history of incompetence & of blatant violations of state & federal laws.”
Scott went further, filing lawsuits on Thursday night against Snipes, who in the past has been slammed by a federal judge for illegally destroying ballots, as well as Palm Beach County elections supervisor Susan Bucher, over their counties’ delays in counting votes. “Every Floridian should be concerned there may be rampant fraud happening in Palm Beach and Broward counties,” he said in a televised speech outside the Florida governor’s mansion, adding “I will not sit idly by while unethical liberals try to steal this election from the great people of Florida.” He went on to accuse “left-wing activists in Broward County” of flooding the system with fake ballots. “We all know what is going on. Every person in Florida knows exactly what is happening,” he said. “Their goal is to keep mysteriously finding more votes until the election turns out the way they want.” His and Rubio’s theories took wing, yielding ever-more-sinister “evidence”: a teacher discovered a box labeled “provisional ballots” in a Broward County elementary school, while independent Congressional candidate Tim Canova tweeted a video of ballot boxes being loaded onto a rental truck. “This violates all chain of custody requirements for paper ballots. Were the ballots destroyed & replaced by set of fake ballots?” he asked. (Rubio re-tweeted the video.)
As the hanging chads of 2000 portended, it was inevitable that Florida’s finicky voting systems would become fodder for conspiracy in the highly charged atmosphere of 2018. At present, operatives are at each others’ throats. “The goal here is to see that all the votes in Florida are counted and counted accurately,” Dan McLaughlin, a campaign spokesman for Nelson, told reporters in a statement. “Rick Scott’s action appears to be politically motivated and borne out of desperation.” Of course, if Nelson—and especially Gillum—manages to eke out a win, it could be hugely consequential for the state of play in 2020, when both Rubio and Trump are up for re-election. A Democratic Senator in Florida could foretell a shift in the upper chamber in two years, and a Gillum victory may embolden others in red states to run on a similarly progressive platform. But even if they fall short, given how evenly split the state’s electorate is between Democrats and Republicans, Florida may end up being the theater for a 2020 campaign of endless ads, dirty tricks, and even more frivolous lawsuits, with both sides primed to call foul play.
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