Election 2018 Ain’t Over

Ken AshfordElection 2018Leave a Comment

Fucking Florida.  Fucking Palm Breach County. Fucking Broward County. Fucking Recounts. Fuck Fuck Fuck.

On the one hand, there is a process that has to be followed for close races, so those procedures need to be followed. But already, just like in the Bush-Gore race, the lawsuits are flying faster than a wet cat in the shower.

At issue are three Florida races — senator, governor, and (yawn!) Florida’s secretary of agriculture.  And one Georgia race — the governorship.

What doesn’t help is this bullshit from Trump:

Ballots are the new caravan.

The president’s desire to use results from Election Night, which he tweeted on Veterans Day, would disenfranchise many votes that are counted after Election Day, including voters serving overseas in the military. Overseas and military ballots can arrive until Nov. 16 and will be counted, as long as they’re postmarked on or before Election Day.

Additionally, there is no evidence that ballots “showed up out of nowhere,” but rather ballots continued to be counted days after the election — largely mail-in, absentee and provisional ballots in slow counties like Broward and Palm Beach, which lean Democrat. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has no open investigations into any claims of potential fraud, ABC News confirmed Sunday afternoon.

Trump has made claims of improper election results before, most notably after the 2016 election, when he said there were more than three million illegal votes cast — about the same number more votes Hillary Clinton received in the popular vote. However, his own voter fraud commission disbanded over the summer after many governors refused to cooperate and the group was unable to provide any evidence to back up that claim.

So where are we?

Palm Beach and Broward counties have until Thursday at 3 p.m. to finish their recounts, but Palm Beach County election officials expressed concern over the weekend that they wouldn’t be able to run more than 8.2 million ballots through the machines in time. It’s not clear what might happen if the deadline is missed, but legal action to extend the count was likely.

According to Florida Secretary of State spokeswoman Sarah Revell, who said Florida state law doesn’t grant her office the power to extend recount deadlines, if a county doesn’t submit results by the deadline, the election results revert to the count fro Election Day.

An automatic machine recount began Saturday in the Senate and gubernatorial races, as well as the statewide race for agriculture commissioner, because each was within the margin of 0.5 percent.

In the gubernatorial race, former Rep. Ron DeSantis leads Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, by 0.41 percent, according to the Florida Division of Elections as of Monday morning. Gillum replaced his concession from Election Night over the weekend with an “unapologetic and uncompromised call to count every vote.”

In the race for U.S. Senate, incumbent Democrat Sen. Bill Nelson is edging closer to Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who leads by just 0.15 percent, as of Monday morning.

To be continued no doubt.

UPDATE — ah…. a sane man: