Elections 2010-30 by Adam Kerfoot-Roberts, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0/Original

Florida is in the midst of a recount that is showing Third World potentates that they have nothing to fear from elections so long as they follow Stalin’s dictum, “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.”

This is the setup.

Three races in Florida are undergoing a recount: senator, governor, and agriculture commissioner. The machine recount phase, by law, had to end at 3 p.m. yesterday. If any of the races were closer than 0.25 percentage points, then a hand recount would be required. And a hand recount is where the real vote farm is for the Democrats. It is during a hand recount that the counters know how many votes they have to come up with to drag the Democrat across the finish line and the counters get to divine “voters’ intent” and deal with those pesky “undervotes” in the wrong races.

The catch is that if a county misses the 3 p.m. deadline for reporting, then their machine recount tallies are invalidated and the election night totals become official.

To no one’s surprise, Palm Beach County didn’t make the deadline. It was pretty obvious from the get-go that they simply had no intention of trying to complete the machine recount in a timely fashion. Much to everyone’s surprise, Broward County finished its machine recount with time to spare. According to reports, the machine recount tally was ready for transmission nearly a half-hour before the deadline.

There was just one problem. Rick Scott gained 779 votes (the net of votes found for Scott and votes Nelson lost) and Ron DeSantis gained 755. This was not part of the script.

What happened nex? The Broward elections honcho delayed transmission until approximately 3:02 p.m., colorably complying with state law and a court order and yet two minutes too late for the new vote counts to be considered.

Further north, in Hillsborough County, also a Democrat stronghold, the machine recount gave Rick Scott 140 votes. That county also failed to submit its tally on time and so the old, and inaccurate, count stands.

The design and tactics here are simple. The county had two sets of returns, one with a larger Republican vote total. In both cases, the counties elected to not submit the machine recount total in order to lock in the higher Democrat total. Palm Beach seems to have known what a machine recount would produce and didn’t even bother trying to make the deadline.

Palm Beach County is due to report its machine recount numbers in 33 minutes. They are not done and the machines have been idled for some time. pic.twitter.com/x5XWW8TB9b

— Brad Todd (@BradOnMessage) November 15, 2018

Regardless of these shenanigans, it looks like Ron DeSantis will be certified the winner of the election on November 20, and it seems more and more likely that Rick Scott will hold onto his lead and become the next senator from Florida.

The larger issue, of course, is blatant lawlessness on the part of Democrat-run election boards in Florida’s most populous counties. Rick Scott, to a great extent, is being hoisted on his own petard because the blind partisanship and stunning incompetence of the head of Broward’s board of elections was well documented and Scott did nothing. Hopefully, DeSantis learns a lesson from this and makes reform or the election system before 2020 a top priority.

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