Hanging Chads, the Sequel The Democrat who won the 2008 recount for Al Franken is in Florida.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hanging-chads-the-sequel-1542068804
Florida’s Secretary of State on Saturday announced statewide recounts in the elections for Senate and Governor, but don’t think this ends the counting if Republicans Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis continue to lead. Democrats have dispatched their prize election litigator Marc Elias to the state, so look for this to go as far as his lawsuits will take them.
After Florida’s 67 counties submitted unofficial results Saturday, Mr. Scott led Democratic Senator Bill Nelson by about 12,600 votes and Mr. DeSantis led Andrew Gillum by some 33,600. Those margins are under 0.5% of total votes cast, triggering an automatic machine recount under Florida law.
This isn’t likely to change the outcome. The nonprofit FairVote—which supports structural voting changes—analyzed 4,687 statewide elections between 2000 and 2015. There were 27 statewide recounts and only three resulted in an election reversal—Democrat Al Franken’s 2008 Senate race in Minnesota, a 2006 auditor race in Vermont, and Washington’s gubernatorial contest in 2004. The recounts resulted in an average change in the margin between the two lead candidates of 282 votes.
Florida’s infamous presidential recount in 2000 backs up these findings. George W. Bush ended election night 1,784 votes ahead of Al Gore. An automatic recount dropped that lead to 327 votes. Even after Democratic shenanigans involving selective hand recounts, Mr. Bush ended with a 537 vote lead. Florida still used punchcard ballots in 2000 while today it mostly uses electronic voting systems.
This explains why Mr. Elias is talking up what he calls an “undervote” in Broward County, a Democratic stronghold where some 25,000 more votes were cast for Governor than for Senate. Mr. Elias claims that a “tabulation” error is denying Mr. Nelson thousands of votes.
The undervote is more likely the result of poor ballot design. The box for the Senate race was on the bottom left corner of Broward ballots, underneath the voting instructions—which may have confused some voters. The Tampa Bay Times reports that MIT political scientist Charles Stewart III found that “the Broward undervoting rate was about the same for early voting, vote by mail and Election Day voting—which would seem to suggest that undervoting should be attributed to humans, not machines.”
Mr. Elias is hoping to turn up enough ballots during the machine recount to hold Mr. Scott within the 0.25% margin necessary to trigger a recount by hand. That would give him the ability to contest the “undervote” ballot by ballot in Democratic strongholds. Mr. Elias said Saturday that a hand recount will cause Mr. Scott’s lead to “evaporate entirely.” This could be hanging chads, the sequel. Mr. Gillum can’t claim a tabulation error to account for his deficit, but he has also withdrawn his election-night concession in hope of his own deus ex Marc Elias.
Mr. Scott has already won two legal judgments requiring election supervisors in Broward and Palm Beach counties to open their vote-counting process to campaign lawyers. This may reduce the chance that they suddenly discover boxes of supposedly uncounted votes, in the Lyndon Johnson tradition. On Monday the Nelson team nonetheless filed a lawsuit demanding that even mail-in ballots that had arrived 10 days after election night be counted.
Florida has given counties until 3 p.m. Thursday to finish the machine recount, and the state needs to insist on that deadline. The longer this stretches on, the more opportunity for mischief, and the less confidence voters will have in the integrity of Florida’s election.
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