Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Recount drama could sow chaos in 2020
Trump used midterms to tout false claims of voter fraud
Florida’s 2018 recount is over, but the work to restore the public’s confidence has just started.
Political combatants didn’t hold their fire in Florida’s midterm elections, unleashing a barrage of unsupported allegations of voter fraud and conspiracy theories.
Vote-counting stumbles — from overheated machines to misplaced ballots — only added more distrust as election workers scrambled to complete recounts in three statewide races.
The ensuing chaos could be only a preview of what’s to come in two years when President Donald Trump faces reelection. Trump has touted false claims that millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2016 presidential election.
The president used Florida’s midterm elections to inject even more doubt, going as far to suggest with no evidence that people were using disguises to vote multiple times in elections.
“It doesn’t help instill confidence when you have some supervisor of election offices that have questionable results,” said Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida. “It doesn’t help the case either when you have elected officials making accusations without any evidence.”
Rick Hasen, an expert on election law at the University of California, Irvine, wrote that Trump could be building a case for staying in power if he loses a close election.
“Perhaps most terrifyingly of all, the 2018 Florida elections have demonstrated the real possibility that President Donald Trump might attempt to ignore an unfavorable 2020 election outcome if the result is a slim loss by the president, a possibility that should give us all chills,” he wrote in a column for Slate.
Politicians unleash fraud claims
Republican Gov. Rick Scott took a measured tone during his Senate campaign, saying that voters needed to “elect people who bring people together.”
But his demeanor changed when he saw his lead over incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson shrinking as results came in from the Democratic strongholds of Broward and Palm Beach counties.
Scott held a news conference with the governor’s mansion as the backdrop. He questioned whether “rampant fraud” was happening in Broward and Palm Beach counties. Then he asked for state police to investigate.
Republican Gov.-elect Ron DeSantis, who had a more sizable lead over his Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum, stayed mostly silent during the recount. DeSantis, a Trump ally, used intermediaries to ask the president to tone down his comments raising questions about voter fraud in Florida, The New York Times reported.
The only election fraud investigation made public so far relates to allegations that members of the Florida Democratic Party altered the deadline listed on an elections form used to fix problems with mail-in ballots.
That didn’t have anything to do with the illegal casting of ballots, though. The Naples Daily News reported the intention was to compile affidavits in case a judge extended the time frame to fix problems with mail-in ballots with mismatched signatures.
Scott and other Republicans hammered the voter fraud message on Fox News and Twitter. Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio accused Democrats of trying to “steal an election.” Trump tweeted law enforcement was looking into “a big corruption scandal having to do with election fraud.”
Reforms eyed for 2020
Ideas are already being floated for how the electoral process could be improved.
More uniform standards could be enacted for mailin ballots. The state rejected about 10,000 mail-in ballots because of mismatched signatures and other issues. More time could be added for counties to complete recounts or new penalties created if they miss deadlines.
New Florida House Speaker José Oliva, a Republican, said he expects election reform will be an issue for the Legislature, but he didn’t call for specific reforms. Instead, he said the issue might be more about ensuring “adherence to the law” than passing new legislation. He blamed Broward and Palm Beach counties for causing much of the trouble.
“I think we need to look at everything,” Oliva told reporters during an organizational session in Tallahassee. “The bottom line is we need to make sure people can trust their electoral process.”
The midterm elections stirred memories of Florida’s infamous 2000 recount. Protesters chanted for election officials to be “locked up.” Election workers blamed overheated voting machines for blown deadlines. “Saturday Night Live” lampooned Florida for its vote-counting stumbles.
An exasperated federal judge proclaimed that Florida was “the laughingstock of the world,” and Broward County commissioners worried that the episode was giving their community a PR black eye.
In Broward County, election workers missed a deadline to submit recount results by two minutes. They misplaced about 2,000 ballots during the recount with Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes repeating that the ballots were somewhere in the building, but she didn’t know where. Snipes submitted her resignation, effective Jan. 4, writing that she is “ready to pass the torch.”
While Miami-Dade County promptly reported its results, Broward County’s tallies trickled out, and Snipes couldn’t explain how many votes still needed to be counted.
Poor ballot design in Broward County could have caused thousands of people not to vote in the U.S. Senate race, potentially costing Nelson his seat. The race was tucked in the bottom left corner of the ballot below the instructions.
Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher couldn’t meet key recount deadlines. She blamed out-dated equipment that could only conduct one recount at a time. The Palm Beach County Commission has budgeted about $11 million for Bucher to buy new equipment for the 2020 election.
In an interview this week with WPTV-Ch. 5, Bucher didn’t indicate that she has any intention of resigning, saying that she “didn’t see any evidence of voter fraud.”
It wasn’t just Democratic-leaning counties that had issues. Bay County, which includes the Panama City area, accepted ballots by email and fax from hurricane-ravaged residents, despite not being authorized to do so under state law.
Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist who headed former President Barack Obama’s campaign in Florida in 2008, said all sides need to come together to restore the public’s trust.
“All of us who work in politics have a responsibility to defend the institutions we all work in,” he said. “If we don’t have confidence in them, the people we are asking to vote for our candidates won’t have confidence in them.”