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It’s been a week since Election Day, but in two states, the fight over the midterms is only just beginning. Florida is reclaiming its 2000 championship title as America’s disputed-recount king and Georgia isn’t far behind. Are we any closer to a final tally? And who’s suing for what in order to help them get past the finish line?
Deadlines: Under Florida law, elections go to a machine count if the margin of difference between the candidates is less than 0.5 percent. The first set of unofficial results, which were reported Saturday, showed Gov. Rick Scott with a narrow lead of just under 13,000 votes—or a 0.16 percent difference—over incumbent Bill Nelson in the race for a U.S. Senate seat. That’s well under the threshold for a machine recount.
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The machine recount started Saturday and triggered more deadlines. The second set of unofficial results from a machine recount of votes are due by Thursday, Nov. 15. On Nov. 16, officials are allowed to begin counting ballots submitted by overseas military personnel. But there’s one big problem: No one believes that Palm Beach County—Florida’s third largest—will be able to meet that deadline. Broward County, the second largest county in the state, is also moving slowly with its machine recount, but officials are optimistic they’ll meet the deadline.
What happens if they don’t meet Thursday’s deadline? The first unofficial results reported on Saturday are the ones that the state will use to determine the winner.
Qui bono: Who’s for a recount and who’s against it? No candidate has officially come out to say he’s against a recount but Scott’s legal team has tried to throw the most wrenches into the recount process. The Scott campaign has filed a series of lawsuits targeting Broward County Election Supervisor Brenda Snipes, including one that demands a court seize and impound Broward’s voting machines and ballots. The suit, since shot down by a court, insinuated without evidence that Snipes is liable “to destroy evidence of any errors, accidents, or unlawful conduct” and allegedly engaged in “suspect and unlawful vote-counting practices.” Snipes denies the claims of “rampant fraud” and says she’s baffled by how she became an instant hate figure for Republicans. “I’ve never been a target like this in my life,” Snipes told reporters.
As mentioned, if a county misses its Thursday recount deadline, the results from Saturday stand. Nelson won the Broward County vote 69.1 to 30.9 percent over Scott and took Palm Beach County 58.4 to 41.6 percent. So why would Scott and Republican officials want to stop a recount and lock in those results? The math is pretty obvious. A recount in heavily Democratic Broward and Palm Beach is unlikely to find more Republican votes for Scott. In fact, his lead over Nelson shrank between Election Night and the reporting of the first unofficial results. Palm Beach and Broward are also two of the three most populous counties in Florida. If Scott can freeze the first unofficial results in place, Nelson is left only with Republican counties and a few less populous Democratic ones to try and overcome his 13,000-vote deficit.
Gillum: The same process that Scott and Nelson are tangling over also applies to the governor’s race between Andrew Gillum and Ron DeStantis, but Gillum—down nearly 34,000 votes in the first unofficial results— is in a deeper vote deficit than his fellow Democrat in the Senate contest and faces longer odds of being saved by a recount. The Daily Beast’s Andrew Desiderio, who is in Florida covering the recounts, reports that sources close to Gillum believe he’s accepted an inevitable loss. Instead, Gillum is reportedly focused on maintaining confidence among his Democratic and African-American base in the electoral system so as not to undermine turnout in future elections.
Georgia: In Georgia, the issue isn’t so much a recount but a count. Democrat Stacey Abrams trails Brian Kemp by around 58,000 votes, and she needs to slim that down to at least 21,000 to trigger a runoff election. Abrams sued Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to stop certification of the vote tallies and asked a federal judge to intervene and allow provisional ballots to continue be counted. On Tuesday, the court granted a temporary stay to prevent certification, but it’s unclear whether Abrams can make up the necessary votes even with more time and ballots counted.
An oasis in the desert: Arizona, for once, is the refreshing outlier of drama-free normalcy. The White House, Politico reported, had been trying to get the Republican candidate Martha McSally to hop on board the conspiracy train and insinuate that the fix was in and the election tally was illegitimate. McSally would have none of it, though. On Tuesday she conceded to Kyrsten Sinema and "congratulated her on becoming Arizona's first female senator after a hard fought battle.” Michele Reagan, Arizona’s Republican secretary of state, also took a measured approach through the vote-counting process. With national Republican figures raging online at election officials where tallies were close, Reagan tried to lower the temperature with transparency. She posted an explanation of what county recorders were doing and why it was taking so long and even backhanded conservative media pushing conspiracy theories about the vote count on Twitter.
Full circle: The last time we had a national election, the biggest threat to its legitimacy in the eyes of Americans came from abroad. According to the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment, Vladimir Putin ordered his intelligence services to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process” in addition to trying to sway the election for Trump. Judging by the rhetoric deployed by American officials, the forecast for the legitimacy of American elections doesn’t look much better this time around.
The president himself has declared, without evidence, that in Florida “many ballots are missing or forged” and that “an honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected.” Republican senators Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham have been only too happy to chime in by blasting “incompetent law-breaking election officials” and the supposed “incompetence and the mischief of Broward County.”
For the 2018 midterms, Russian intelligence mostly sat on the sidelines. It’s not clear why they sat this one out, but maybe one reason is that they didn’t have to get involved: We’re doing a better job of tanking confidence in the vote ourselves than Russian spies ever could’ve ever dreamed.
