2000 All Over Again Recount 2018
It's Déjà Vu in Florida, Land of Recounts and Contested Elections
LAUDERHILL, Fla. — The election that must not be named, the one that scarred Florida's collective psyche 18 years ago, came back to haunt the state on Friday, a specter of competing lawsuits, rowdy protests and disputed ballots in Tuesday's vote that inescapably harkened back to the political drama of 2000.
Again, the prospect of a recount, like the one that kept the presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore in limbo. Again, trouble in South Florida, the center of action nearly two decades ago. Again, an ugly partisan fight with no less than confidence in the state's elections system at stake.
Lawyers and party activists raced to Broward and Palm Beach Counties, where two of the most closely watched races in the country — for a Senate seat and for governor — still hang in the balance, nearly four days after the election on Tuesday. Judges held emergency hearings, siding with Republicans who questioned the secrecy imposed on ballot counts by local elections officials. Democrats sued, challenging local processes that render thousands of ballots invalid.
President Trump weighed in, warning darkly on Twitter of "potential corruption" and "election theft," though there was little or no evidence to suggest anything more than the usual delay and dithering that have come to characterize Florida elections.
"It's not a crisis of the Constitution," said Katherine Harris, the Republican who was Florida's secretary of state during the recount in 2000. "It's a close race. We've had those races in Florida, obviously, but they're going to have to be patient with the process."
Yet patience was hard to find on Friday, and nowhere was it scarcer than in Broward County, the state's second-largest county and a Democratic bastion that has had so many ballot controversies that The Miami Herald called it "the most controversial elections department" in South Florida. Dozens of protesters descended on a canvassing board meeting there on Friday to demand the ouster of an elections supervisor who has presided over many of Broward's ballot-counting dramas.
The supervisor, Brenda C. Snipes, is an elected Democrat, initially appointed by former Gov. Jeb Bush, and her office has been criticized for a litany of problems. Elections employees were found to have unlawfully destroyed counted ballots in a congressional race in 2016. Mailed-in ballots were secretly opened. A constitutional amendment over legalizing medical marijuana was left off some ballots. In 2016, Broward's software vendor posted election results online early.
New problems started surfacing this week. On Thursday, a teacher complained that the county had left an empty box for provisional ballots at a polling place inside a school. And then there were the ballots that were still being canvassed on Friday, amid continuing protests from Gov. Rick Scott (the Republican in the contested Senate race), Republican Party lawyers who flew in from Washington, journalists, protesters and finally, Mr. Trump.
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"If you look at Broward County, they have had a horrible history," the president said before departing Washington on a trip to Europe. "And if you look at the person — in this case, a woman — involved, she has had a horrible history. And all of a sudden, they're finding votes out of nowhere."
The mere mention of Florida these days still evokes nightmares for Democrats who worked closely with Vice President Al Gore 18 years ago. Florida's 25 electoral votes at the time — and the presidency itself — were up in the air for 36 grueling days while ballots were recounted and the country watched and waited. The drama ended with an indecipherable but wholly consequential Supreme Court decision that put Mr. Bush in office.
"It's inconceivable that 18 years after 2000, Florida still hasn't developed competencies in terms of counting ballots in an orderly and timely manner," said one former top Gore aide who did not want to be named for fear of stirring up old ghosts.
But Florida wasn't the only state still furiously counting ballots.
In the Georgia governor's race, the state was still trying to determine if the candidates were headed for a runoff. Brian Kemp, the Republican currently ahead of his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, by about 63,000 votes, declared victory this week. But allies of Ms. Abrams spent Friday in a vigorous push to get people who cast provisional ballots because of identification problems to take a final step to ensure their votes would count.
In Arizona, Kyrsten Sinema, the Democratic candidate in the state's uncalled Senate race, expanded her lead on Friday to 20,203 votes over Martha McSally, the Republican contender.
As the complicated political maneuverings unfolded in Florida, there were constant reminders that, 18 years after the Bush-Gore controversies, Florida remains in Republican control — a crucial factor in an election where partisan interests are at stake. Florida Republicans in 2018 hold the same levers of power over the election that they did in 2000, with the governor appointing the secretary of state in charge of elections.
By Friday, when the Senate race appeared to be squarely within the margins of an automatic recount — Mr. Scott was ahead of the Democratic incumbent, Senator Bill Nelson, by only 0.18 percentage points — the governor's own lawsuits were heard in state court. He had filed them the night before against Dr. Snipes and her counterpart in Palm Beach County, Susan Bucher, over how the last ballots were being counted and reported.
The governor's successful lawsuits focused on access to defective ballots (in Palm Beach) and to complete vote totals (in Broward), but the governor also said, without evidence, that there was "rampant fraud." He went as far as calling on the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate Dr. Snipes and Ms. Bucher, who is also a Democrat.
But a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said on Friday that no fraud allegations had been made to the Florida Department of State, which oversees elections, and that no criminal investigations of Dr. Snipes or Ms. Bucher would take place. Mr. Scott did succeed in getting a state court judge to find that Ms. Snipes had violated the State Constitution, and public records laws, in refusing to disclose detailed information about ballots and tallies.
Ms. Snipes did not respond to requests for an interview, and did not speak publicly on Friday.
In both counties, the canvassing boards worked into the night, examining each provisional ballot cast by people who faced some kind of irregularity on Election Day, such as not bringing identification or showing up at the wrong precinct.
Secretary of State Ken Detzner was expected on Saturday to order recounts in both the Senate and governor's races, in addition to the race for state agriculture commissioner, once unofficial results come in from all of the state's 67 counties. In the contest for governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, leads Andrew Gillum, a Democrat, by 0.44 percentage points.
"It's very unfortunate that some of the highest elected officials in our country are trying to disrupt our democracy because they don't like the demographics of our voters," Ms. Bucher said. "I would wish they would allow us to continue to count the ballots."
In Broward, civic leaders who have known Dr. Snipes for years dismissed the suggestion that any nefarious activity was underway.
"To do fraud, you have to be clever," said Lori Parrish, the county's former elected property appraiser and a Democrat who endorsed Dr. Snipes's opponent in 2016. "I don't think there's fraud. There's incompetence."
Ms. Parrish and others expressed exasperation that Broward was once again en route to becoming a late-night television punch line.
"They laugh at us and call us 'Floriduh,'" Ms. Parrish lamented.
Steve Geller, a Democratic county commissioner who was in the State Senate during the 2000 recount, said politicians have been loath to publicly criticize Dr. Snipes because she, like them, is an elected official. But they are frustrated, too.
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"Miami-Dade is a larger county than we are, and they seem to have no problem with counting ballots in a timely fashion," he said. "I'm not happy."
But others warned against blaming Ms. Snipes and her staff in an election in which turnout was unusually high for a midterm election.
"Let's not forget: She was appointed by a Republican to right the ship," said former State Senator Chris Smith, a Democrat. "And she has righted the ship. Because of the closeness of the election, she's getting a lot of scrutiny, but let's not forget there's hundreds of thousands of votes in Arizona being counted, too."
The challenges were not limited to Republicans. Mr. Nelson and the Democratic Executive Committee of Florida sued in federal court in Tallahassee, the state capital, arguing that the patchwork of local procedures to determine which voter signatures are deemed valid was unconstitutional. Even a former congressman, Patrick Murphy, a Democrat, said on Friday that he learned the ballot he cast by mail in Palm Beach County was not counted because of a signature issue he did not learn about until he checked on Thursday.
"It's hard to believe that it's still Broward and Palm Beach Counties having these issues," he said. "We really do need to look at our system and see how we improve it."
Mr. Nelson, in his first remarks since Mr. Scott's scorched-earth comments about fraud on Thursday, said in a statement that every ballot should be counted.
"Scott is abusing the full force of his public office as governor to stop a complete and accurate counting of all the votes in Florida — which would determine whether he wins or loses," he said. "The governor has decided to abandon the most fundamental of all rights, because he fears that he will lose the election if all the votes are counted."
Outside of Florida, veterans of the 2000 recount could not help but compare what had changed between then and now. Florida voters no longer punch cards to vote, so there are no more "hanging chads" or "butterfly ballots." But the nasty political fight, they noted, seems no different.
"We're the only major democracy that allows partisans who are deeply interested in the election process to run it. It's banana-republic stuff," said Ron Klain, who was general counsel of Mr. Gore's recount committee in 2000. "Florida was a closely divided state 20 years ago, and it's a closely divided state today. This doesn't happen elsewhere because other states are not as closely divided."
Said Ms. Harris: "It still feels as though it were yesterday."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/09/us/florida-ballots-recount-scott-nelson-gillum-desantis.html
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