You Ain’t Got the Votes
Yes – another Hamilton reference – the theme of our time!!!
I’m sitting in my camper in beautiful Florida; home of palm trees, beaches, fire ants, and never-ending election turmoil. This is a state so on the edge of Republican and Democrat that “purple” really doesn’t describe how narrow the margins are. But just because Florida is teetering on balance doesn’t mean that the support for either party is throughout the state. Florida has Democratic strongholds, and huge swaths of what we now call Trump Country.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the highly contested election of 2018 didn’t finish on Election Day. The Senate race pitted an old fashioned Democratic candidate, three-termer Bill Nelson, against a healthcare billionaire turned Governor, Rick Scott. The Governor’s race pitted Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, vying to be the first black man to earn the office, against Congressman Rick DeSantis, who literally modeled himself after President Donald Trump.
Over eight million votes were cast in the Florida election. They have “all” been unofficially counted – it took until Saturday – leaving Scott with a less than 13,000 vote lead, 0.2%. DeSantis has a 33,000 vote lead, 0.3%. Election boards had to wait for late mail arrivals of absentee votes, and check the validity of provisional ballots.
Florida is already in an automatic “mechanical” recount, where the ballots are run back through the counting machines for both races. Should the outcome be within 0.25% in either or both races, the ballots that were “rejected” by the machines will be examined by hand, to determine if “the intent” of the voter can be discerned. If the examiners can reach a judgment, then that ballot will be added to the total.
Every vote counts. That’s the “School House Rock” version of the American political process; Americans of all races, creeds, religions, gender orientations, and ethnicity; lining up together to “make their mark” on the ballot. But we know that traditionally the American electoral process has been fraught with attempts to alter the outcome by illegally changing votes. The rarely seen $2 bill (with Thomas Jefferson’s face) “earned” it’s unpopularity in the late 1800’s because it was “the price” of a vote; if you had one, you must have sold your vote.
And we had all sorts of obstructions to voting in our history, from the “Jim Crow” literacy tests of the past, to the current practices of voter suppression in Georgia, and Kansas, and North Dakota, and other places in the nation. So it shouldn’t be so much of a surprise that there is “outrage” in Florida that votes are being recounted. Scott and DeSantis are winning in the current count; counting more votes, particularly in Broward and Palm Beach Counties, both highly Democratic, isn’t going to improve their lead.
The Republicans are following the path blazed by Jim Baker, the chairman of the George W Bush 2000 Presidential campaign. When Florida was declared for Bush by a marginal 500 plus votes; Baker sent teams of lawyers and protestors to do everything they could do disrupt efforts to recount and re-examine ballots. His theory was simple: we won on this count, who wants another one? The Gore team was slow to recognize their opportunity, and so did not hit the ground as quickly, giving Republicans an edge. When the United States Supreme Court voted along party lines five to four to stop vote counting in Florida, it gave Bush the Presidency.
Studies later showed that a full recount would have elected Gore. But there certainly is a case to be made, both then and now, that hundreds of votes out of multiple millions may well be within the “margin of error” where the outcome would waver each count. Put simply, it might be impossible to ascertain the actual outcome by counting.
So here we are, back in Democratic strongholds Palm Beach and Ft Lauderdale, where Republicans are claiming “fraud” and “ballot creation.” Rick Scott has flat out stated that Nelson is trying to “fix” the election, and protestors and lawyers are crowding each other outside of the county election centers. President Trump has weighed in by twitter, claiming fraud and corruption.
It echoes Trump’s claims that the election of 2016 was “rigged,” laying the groundwork for not accepting a Clinton win. He made that very clear in their last debate. To his and the country’s surprise, he won, so I guess it wasn’t rigged enough.
Florida, and Georgia, and Arizona will count and recount the votes. They will reach a final “figure” that will determine who wins and loses. There will be sore losers, and maybe even sore winners. But, if we can keep the counting process going and not use legal and extra-legal means to stop it, we will eventually find who “…ain’t got the votes” and who does. It is the only way to reach an answer that allows the elected to govern with legitimacy.
And that’s the point – faith in the outcomes. Scott, and Trump, and Kemp in Georgia, are doing everything they can to undermine the legitimacy of the process. And while they may win by doing that, they are undermining their own ability to govern, shaking citizens faith in government. They may end up being losers even if they win.
