Last week, the midterm elections happened. This week, the recounts. Florida is proving itself ostensibly incompetent at counting ballots, an observation made all the less acceptable given that it’s been 18 years since 2000 saw scandal in the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Something even more interesting than Florida’s incompetence is the difference between the reactions of Senate candidates Rick Scott (R) and Bill Nelson (D), two candidates locked in a near dead heat, with Scott only a few thousand votes ahead of Nelson at time of writing. Where Rick Scott has acted like he’s already won, even going to Washington and meeting with Mitch McConnell along with the freshman Republican senators, and has committed multiple lawsuits towards ending the recounts, Bill Nelson has sued to extend the recount deadline so that every vote can count. I can’t say whether this would still be the case if Nelson were winning and Scott losing, but I would hope that at the very least Nelson would still be for getting every vote in.
Something that really strikes me is that, according to Florida election law, military and overseas voters get an extra 10 days past election day to get their ballots in, as long as they’re postmarked by election day. That means that the true end of the voting period is November 16, after the recount deadline. It also means that Trump’s tweet about ballots “appearing out of nowhere” is simply incorrect (no surprises there). In the 2016 election, there were more than 78,000 absentee ballots from military servicepeople and overseas voters. That is, at time of writing, more than the margin between Scott and Nelson. Of course every vote should count. That should not, by any means, be debatable.
Moving on to the Florida gubernatorial race between Republican Ron DeSantis and Democrat Andrew Gillum, things are just as heated. While the race has less national reach than the U.S. Senate election, it sheds more light on Florida’s obviously flawed election process. At time of writing, the margin is a bit wider than the Senate election — DeSantis has about 33,000 votes over Gillum compared to the about 12,000 Rick Scott has over Bill Nelson. That’s still within the 78,000 overseas ballots not due until the 16th. Since the recounts for both races are happening at the same time and are deadlined at the same time on the 15th, counties across the state are rushing to get their ballots counted, even overheating counting machines in the process.
Unfortunately, this article is being written before the statewide deadline on recounts, and will come out after it. I do not know who ended up winning, or who will end up winning if the deadline is extended, but I do know that every vote cast should be counted (and hope that they will be).
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