‘Ramp down’ recount rhetoric, judge says
Trump, GOP lawyers allege fraud in Florida despite lack of evidence
After Republicans, including U.S. President Donald Trump, made unsubstantiated accusations of illegal activity, a judge on Monday urged the warring sides in the Florida recount to “ramp down the rhetoric,” saying it erodes public confidence in the election for Senate and governor.
The state’s law enforcement arm and elections monitors have found no evidence of wrongdoing, but lawyers for the Republican party and the GOP candidates joined with Trump in alleging that irregularities, unethical behaviour and fraud have taken place since the polls closed last week.
“An honest vote count is no longer possible” in Florida, Trump declared Monday, without elaborating. He demanded that the election night results — which showed the Republicans leading based upon incomplete ballot counts — be used to determine the winner.
Trump went on to allege that “new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged,” and that ballots are “massively infected.” It was unclear what he was referring to. The recount that is underway is mandated by state law.
Much of the Republicans’ ire was centred on Democrat-leaning Broward County and its supervisor of elections Brenda Snipes, a Democrat who was appointed in 2003 by then-Republican governor Jeb Bush. She has been re-elected four times. Critics have suggested the slow pace of ballot-counting in Broward is suspicious.
Broward elections officials have said this year’s count was encumbered by the unexpectedly high turnout for a midterm election and the unusual length of this year’s ballots, which contained 12 state constitutional amendment proposals, partly as a result of a constitutional revision commission that meets once every 20 years.
Bush said Monday on Twitter that Snipes should be removed from office, saying there was “no question” that she “failed to comply with Florida law on multiple counts, undermining Floridians’ confidence in our electoral process.”
Snipes acknowledged Monday that “there have been issues that haven’t gone the way we wanted.”
Once the recount is complete, if the differences in any of the races are 0.25 percentage points or less, a hand recount will be ordered. All 67 counties face a deadline of Thursday to finish their recounts.
Meanwhile, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won Arizona’s open U.S. Senate seat, beating Republican Rep. Martha McSally in the battle to replace GOP Sen. Jeff Flake.
The three-term congresswoman won after a slow vote count that dragged on for nearly a week after voters went to the polls. Her win cemented Arizona as a swing state after years of Republican dominance.