‘Stress test’ for 2020: Florida recount sets rules of engagement for 2020 race

Two days after Election Day, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., got a call from President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign manager: Get to Broward County, Florida’s Democratic stronghold, where officials were still tallying ballots in a tight U.S. Senate race.

Around the same time, Marc Elias, a top Democratic Party lawyer who was general counsel to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, was preparing to fly to Florida to lead a likely recount in that contest.

Over the next eight days, armies of lawyers and party operatives swarmed the state as elections officials undertook a laborious recount of the Senate vote and two other statewide elections, racing into courtrooms and onto the airwaves and social media to jockey over every ballot.

In the end, the exhausting fight did little to change Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s lead over Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson, who now appears to face insurmountable odds. But there was much more at stake in the nation’s biggest presidential swing state: the rules of engagement for 2020.

Florida’s sprawling and diverse landscape of largely Democratic big cities, politically independent suburbs and conservative rural swaths make it a key battleground for debates over voting rights and ballot access expected to shape the next campaign.

“The recount was a stress test of the Florida electoral system,” said Gaetz, who had just left Broward County when the call came from Brad Parscale to drive the 300 miles back. “If you were the Trump 2020 campaign, wouldn’t you have concerns right now about what the terrain here will look like?”

Charles Lichtman, a Democratic attorney who worked on Florida’s infamous 2000 recount and represented Nelson and the Florida Democratic Party this year, called last week’s recount

“the warm-up.”

“Starting tomorrow, 2020 will be the most important election in our lifetime,” he said.

As they slogged through the vote counts, party operatives and lawyers wielded the tactics they are honing for the next contest.

For Democrats, who typically perform better in high-turnout elections, that meant pushing to count as many votes as possible and accusing Republicans of trying to suppress the vote. For Republicans, the goal was to limit the number of eligible votes and claim Democrats were trying to steal the election.

The tone was set by Trump, who fired a series of tweets after Election Day exhorting the GOP to “expose the FRAUD!” In a news conference from the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee, Scott accused Democrats of “rampant fraud.” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., invoked the Bible to make the same case, tweeting: “What is crooked cannot be made straight, and you cannot count what is not there.”

Democrats — including the party’s last presidential nominee — said the GOP was trying to disenfranchise eligible voters, especially people of color.

“It’s unbelievable that any elected official wouldn’t call for a fair and accurate count of the votes,” said Clinton in a fundraising email for Nelson one week after the election.

Potential 2020 Democratic contenders such as Sen. Kamala Harris of California and Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey also weighed in, urging election officials to count every vote.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. — who deployed a staffer to Florida in the homestretch of the race and gave $50,000 from her re-election campaign to Florida Democrats last month — sent out a fundraising appeal on Nelson’s behalf.

On the ground in Broward County, street protesters also looked ahead to the next presidential contest. One day during the recount, a few dozen people rallied outside the elections

office, many wearing black T-shirts touting “The New Florida Majority,” a group that aims to increase the voting clout among minorities and immigrants. There were no Nelson campaign T-shirts in sight.

“Florida has a history of voter suppression and discrimination,” said Serena Perez, the group’s organizing director. “They’ve tried all tricks in the book before, after and during the election, yet we’re still on the verge of winning this state.”

Others who came to register their objections to Democrats also appeared to have little vested in the Senate race. David Rosenthal was among those protesting Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes, who has been accused of mismanagement. “If I were going to be frank with you, I don’t give a flying fig about Rick Scott,” he said, wearing a Trump 2020 baseball hat.

Separate dramas played out in courthouses across the state, where campaign lawyers parried judges’ rapid-fire questions in about a dozen dueling legal fights throughout the week. Republicans, Democrats and civil rights groups challenged mail-in ballots rejected for mismatched signatures and rules for inspecting ballots by hand, among other issues.

“I didn’t come all the way to Florida on a week when I’ve had no sleep because my primary concern was what happens in this one election,” said Myrna Pérez, a voting-rights lawyer with New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice.

Pérez represented the League of Women Voters of Florida, which intervened in a lawsuit Scott filed seeking to toss Broward County ballots counted after Nov. 10, the deadline to finish the initial canvass. A judge ruled against Scott.

“My hope is that a candidate will think twice before coming into a courtroom and asking a judge to stop counting ballots cast by eligible voters in a timely way because of a mistake by an election official,” Pérez said.