The two Florida counties that haven’t finished counting their votes yet continue counting—too slowly, for sure—are bringing Democrats Andrew Gillum and Sen. Bill Nelson closer and closer to their Republican opponents, and Republicans are really not happy about that. Since we’re talking about Republicans, they see something suspicious in the counting of votes and really want it to stop.
Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani are tweeting angrily about how suspicious it is, while Sen. Marco Rubio is trying to strike a balance between pretending to support vote-counting while sharing conspiracy theory videos. For his part, Gov. Rick Scott—currently narrowly leading the Senate race within the margin for a hand recount—has filed suit and is demanding an investigation, because “Every day since the election the left-wing activists in Broward County have been coming up with more and more ballots out of nowhere” and “I will not sit idly by while unethical liberals try and steal this election from the great people of Florida.” Those darn unethical liberals, counting every vote! Republicans keep trying to stop voting and vote-counting, yet somehow it continues.
By the end of the day Thursday, Scott led Nelson by 15,079 votes and Ron DeSantis led Gillum by 36,219, out of 8.2 million cast. Their races are not the only ones headed for recount in what the Tampa Bay Times described as “recount-ageddon”: the agriculture commissioner race and three state legislative races could also be headed for recount. That could cause serious problems for counties that can only do one recount at a time and may have trouble meeting a hard deadline imposed by state law.
Somehow we’re living the worst of 2018 and 2000 all at the same time.
