What’s Happening In Florida and Arizona

On élection night, it appeared that the GOP had picked up three Senate seats. Now, two of them may be in doubt.

In Florida, there didn’t seem to be any question on November 6. Senator Bill Nelson conceded that he had lost to Governor Rick Scott, while Andrew Gillum likewise conceded to Ron DeSantis. But then the national Democratic Party swung into action. Election officials in Broward County and Palm Beach County began ignoring Florida election laws and, in the case of Palm Beach, a court order. And Nelson and Gillum have withdrawn their concessions.

Mollie Hemingway has the best summary I’ve seen of what has been going on:

Florida voters elected Republican Ron DeSantis as governor and Republican Rick Scott as senator on election night. Both were announced as winners and their opponents conceded defeat. But then Democratic lawyer Marc Elias announced that Democrats would be going for a recount and would win the Senate seat.
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To make sure that votes aren’t being invented or destroyed to effect an outcome, one of the first priorities of any election supervisor is to announce how many ballots are in possession and how many remain to be counted. To fail to do this, as the Broward County and Palm Beach County Supervisors had, is to open themselves up to the accusation of massive vote fraud.

Citizens can not have confidence that ballots are not being destroyed, or created, when supervisors fail to immediately announce how many ballots are on hand.

Florida law also requires that vote-by-mail and absentee ballots are accounted for within 30 minutes of polls closing. While the other 65 counties in Florida had no problem following this state law, the supervisors of Broward County and Palm Beach County refused to follow that law.

Florida law also requires that the Department of State be given reports every 45 minutes until results are completely filed. Palm Beach County has refused to do this.

Senator Marco Rubio has been Paul Revere, calling attention to the blatantly illegal actions by Democratic Party election supervisors.

Rubio reminded Americans that Broward County’s supervisor had a history of election problems, including illegally destroying ballots, secretly opening mail-in ballots, sending voters too many ballot pages, and leaving a constitutional question off the ballot.

The latest revelation is Snipes’ admission that her office accidentally mingled approximately 20 illegal votes with 205 provisional ballots. The illegal votes cannot now be identified.

Hemingway notes that news coverage has been supportive of the scofflaw Democratic election officials, repeatedly asserting that Republicans are criticizing them “without evidence,” notwithstanding that the illegal actions by Broward and Palm Beach officials are indisputable.

Our media completely believe without evidence that Donald Trump engaged in a 30-year conspiracy with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton, but have complete confidence in an election supervisor who earlier this year was found by Florida courts to have illegally hidden and destroyed ballots.

That’s the bad news. The good news, Charles Cooke argues, is that the Democrats have little or no chance to reverse the verdict of the voters.

There is much more at the link, but the bottom line is that those totals are not very close, and it would take something truly extraordinary to reverse De Santis’s and Scott’s wins.

The situation in Arizona is quite different. I am not aware of any controversy about Arizona’s process, and a knowledgeable reader says the large number of still-uncounted ballots is not unusual:

Sinema very likely won. The vast number of ballots uncounted at the end of election day is commonplace in Arizona.

In 2012, Jeff Flake led by 5% on election day, but so many ballots were counted later that his ultimate victory margin was only 3%.

I think that when more ballots are counted from pro-McSally tranches, Sinema’s current lead will shrink by only aboout 5,000 votes. Leaving most of her current lead intact.

So Sinema has a greater than 90% chance of winning.

I am afraid that is correct. This is what I don’t understand: Arizona’s solidly conservative governor, Doug Ducey, was re-elected with a 323,000-vote margin, 57%-43%. This means that hundreds of thousands of Arizonans who voted for Ducey must have crossed over to vote for the hippy-dippy leftist who hates Arizona, Kyrsten Sinema. How is this possible?

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