‘We need to force it.’ Trump’s Florida supporters push for an audit in a state he won
Debbie Horgan, 64, approached the beige house and rapped her knuckles against the door.
A few minutes later, she returned to an SUV idling in the street.
“Another no answer,” she said to the driver, 61-year-old Kevin May. “I’m willing to bet not everyone lives here.”
A recent Saturday morning found Horgan, May and 77-year-old Paul Jordan on a mission. They drove around Pasco County seeking to ferret out voter fraud that local and state election officials have affirmed doesn’t exist. Each knock presented an opportunity to find someone whose address didn’t match their voter registration — and cast doubt on Florida’s election systems.
“I’m doing this because I want to give America a chance,” Jordan told a reporter.
Across Florida, former President Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters are scouring communities for evidence of voter fraud. They are bombarding local elections offices with calls and emails. They are showing up wherever lawmakers are meeting, demanding an audit of last November’s presidential contest that installed Democrat Joe Biden in the White House.
In Tallahassee, they emblazoned their demand on a billboard.
The push for a recount began months ago in states like Arizona, where Trump lost by a narrow margin. (A much-maligned review of ballots in that state’s largest county, led by a Trump supporter, confirmed Biden’s victory.) But the movement is now bleeding into Florida and other states where Trump won comfortably.
This month, the Lake County Republican Party passed a resolution demanding Florida audit its election results. A state lawmaker from the same county filed a bill that would do just that.
The state’s top officials, however, remain unconvinced.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Trump ally, last week reaffirmed his confidence in Florida’s 2020 result.
“What we do in Florida is, there’s a pre- and postelection audit that happens automatically,” DeSantis told reporters Tuesday in St. Petersburg. “So, that has happened. It passed with flying colors.”
In a statement, Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee, a DeSantis appointee who oversees state elections, said the vote tally was “accurate, transparent, and conducted in compliance with Florida law.”
Republican legislative leaders also aren’t embracing calls for an election review. The speaker of the House, Chris Sprowls, has said that the election went well. A spokeswoman for Senate President Wilton Simpson didn’t respond to a request for comments.
Trump, who has urged election reviews in Texas, Georgia and Wisconsin, has made no mention of doing one in Florida.
Surveys show that a significant number of Americans have lost trust in elections everywhere. The complicated mechanics of running an election have never been perfect. But they have become fodder for Trump supporters seeking to question the 2020 results and undermine confidence in future elections.
Many of the Floridians involved in the effort are affiliated with Defend Florida. It is an offshoot of a national group called Defend our Union, which was founded by conservatives after Trump’s defeat.
Members of the national group talk to each other via chat rooms on Telegram: an encrypted messaging service popular in far-right circles where conspiracy theories thrive.
The Tampa Bay Times reviewed thousands of Telegram messages and more than 100 emails to Tampa Bay election offices. They show the role these theories are playing in fueling the recount movement in a state that Trump won by 371,686 votes. Some emails take issue with the use of Dominion-provided voting machines, parroting a conspiracy that has sparked billion-dollar defamation lawsuits against conservative television networks. Others suggest the vote totals were off in Florida, though amounts vary from a few hundred thousand to 1.5 million. They allege sophisticated schemes involving hacked voting software and hijacked mail-in ballots.
Election supervisors say the allegations show a lack of understanding of how voting works.
Mark Andersen, the Republican elections supervisor in Bay County in the Florida Panhandle, said he spent two hours on a Zoom call with representatives from Defend Florida explaining how his office makes sure vote counts are accurate. He said the group didn’t know that his county already audits every ballot.
Andersen said he was open to considering evidence of fraud but he hasn’t seen any.
“Show it to me, if you have it,” he said. “But if you have stuff that’s just bogus, then stop with the bogus behavior.”
Floridians like Horgan, May and Jordan press on, undeterred by elections officials.
“I don’t care that Trump won Florida,” May wrote in an email this month to Pasco’s supervisor of elections, Brian Corley. “We will prove he won it by far more than you say he did.”
‘TIME TO TURN UP THE HEAT’
Chats run by Defend Florida and Florida First Audits, the local chapter of a national organization working to force election audits in every state, have a combined 15,000 members on Telegram. It’s here that Trump supporters plot counties to target and share email addresses of lawmakers and local officials to flood with messages. They swiftly react to the latest developments in Trump’s election challenges.
When DeSantis rebuffed a forensic audit in Florida, the news spread to Telegram.
“Has anyone met with the governor to show the proof?” a person asked.
“This speaks volumes,” said another. “We need to force it.”
“Time for MASSIVE and CONTINUOUS protests in Tallahassee and wherever Gov DeSantis shows up,” added a third. “‘Republicans will NOT vote for an
Election Integrity Denier’ should be the message.”
The groups gained steam in mid-August after Trump supporter and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell held a multi-day gathering of election skeptics to convince the world that the 2020 election was hacked.
They have become a haven for the latest conspiracies and, to a lesser extent, calls for violence.
“We just need an old fashioned Civil War,” one person wrote after Arizona’s audit confirmed Biden’s victory there.
Moderators in these Telegram groups have struggled to beat back violent rhetoric. One told people to stop chatting about “1776 style armed revolution” and focus on audits. To which someone responded, “As of now, NOTHING we are doing is working. Time to turn up the heat, or accept being slaves.”
Emails to the Pinellas, Pasco and Hillsborough elections supervisors reviewed by the Times show how quickly conspiracies spread from Telegram into lobbying. They allege dead voters, illegal voters and underage voters. They question results in counties that Trump lost but also have doubts about vote totals in Pasco, Walton, Santa Rosa, Volusia and Lake counties — all GOP strongholds led by Republican election officers.
“It’s like the last election didn’t end,” said Corley, who at one point changed his email signature to include the FBI tip line for reporting threats against election workers. “It’s like
‘Groundhog Day.’ ”
They often cite the work of Lindell and his associate, Seth Keshel, who provides analysis videos and color-coded maps identifying possible problem counties. In one five-minute video, Keshel crunches some numbers and determines Biden had 30,000 more votes in Hillsborough than he should have. His evidence? His own estimates of what he thinks should have happened based on past results and party registration.
Keshel doesn’t have a background in election analysis. He described himself as a tech-company sales manager and former baseball analyst on his LinkedIn profile before removing it. He claimed on a conservative podcast to have advised DeSantis’ inner circle on which Florida counties to target, which the governor’s office denied. Keshel said he could not remember whom he spoke with and then broke off communication with the Times.
Barry Burden, an elections expert at the University of Wisconsin, called Keshel’s work “biased and amateur armchair political analytics to reach an arbitrary conclusion.” Keshel’s estimates conveniently ignored that nearly a third of Florida voters don’t have a registered party, Burden said, and his analysis falsely assumes party registration determines how someone will vote.
Yet, Keshel’s video provoked the Hillsborough Republican Party to de