Florida Recount: Who is Manipulating Whom?
A recount in Florida’s gubernatorial race didn’t change the results. A separate recount in Florida’s Senate race is looking like it will do the same – reaffirming a Republican victory for Rick Scott. Still, the controversies have been nonstop, with Democrats charging Republicans with trying to impede the democratic process and Republicans charging Democrats with trying to alter the results of the election. Who is manipulating whom? More at Vox.
So even if Nelson were to swing 10 times as many votes in this recount as Gore did in 2000, he would still come up short. Democrats know that recounting the existing votes is unlikely to change the result. So Democrats have filed a series of lawsuits asking courts to change Florida elections laws after the fact. The result would be that they can count ineligible votes in the hope that these will provide the margin necessary to overcome Scott’s lead.
Given the size of Rick Scott’s lead in the race for a United States Senate seat from Florida and Ron DeSantis’s lead in the race to be the state’s governor, most election experts agree there’s little chance that even the most exquisitely careful recount would deny these two Republicans victory. Yet both men are not only acting as if it’s 2000 all over again, when control of the White House hinged on a few hundred votes in Florida, they are also fanning conspiratorial flames with claims of outrageous fraud, seconded by President Trump. The flimsiness of their charges can be measured by the response they’ve gotten not from their political adversaries but from some of their allies.
Elections are how our nation peacefully settles political disputes. For all of the mudslinging and acrimony surrounding our campaigns, elections are a source of strength for our nation. But for elections to matter, voters must have confidence in their integrity… No election win and no partisan outcome is more important than the preservation of the credibility of our democratic system.