The NPR Politics Podcast - Election Night Hasn't Ended Just Yet

Episode Date: November 9, 2018

Election season hasn't actually ended yet as a recount becomes likely in Florida, where a vicious legal battle is brewing. Votes are also still being counted in Georgia, Arizona and California, which could end up changing election results. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political reporter Miles Parks and political editor Domenico Montanaro. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Julian from Zurich in Switzerland, and I've just finished my run. It's not a marathon, it's barely long enough to listen to the weekly roundup. This podcast was recorded at 12.24pm on Friday the 9th of November. Things might have changed by the time you hear this. Keep up with the news on NPR.org or listen to your public radio station. Alright, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here with a quick update because it seems election night really hasn't ended yet. There are recounts likely in Florida. Yes, Florida, where there is a vicious legal battle underway. Plus, votes are still being counted in Georgia, Arizona and California that could change the results. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.

I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. All right, guys, as we speak right now, there are ballots still being counted. Actually, all over America, right? It's not over. And also, it's not abnormal. OK, I think that's important to reference. A lot of people are talking about these ballots that are still being counted.

And I've been calling voting experts since late last night just trying to find somebody who will say, oh, wow, that's really crazy that Broward County has not counted all their ballots. And everybody says, oh, yeah, this is how elections work. Right. So let's just do that. Let's have that conversation. Election night, we were all here. We were highly caffeinated. We were talking about election results. But all the ballots were not counted fully at that point.

Right. Even though it says like 100% of precincts reporting, right? Right. Well, I think that a lot of people get confused about the network calls and projections and how long it actually takes to count all of the ballots in a state or in a race. And sometimes I like to say that, you know, this country does elections pretty well, except when they're close. And the fact is, a lot of that has to do with people's expectations more than it does the fact that

these statewide offices do a bad job. They actually do a pretty good job. It's just that their process is pretty plotting. Right. And I think I was talking to a voting expert. I literally just got off the phone right before I jumped in here. And what she told me is that election officials pray for two things before elections. And the first one, the biggest thing is they pray for wide margins because there's not people like us who come into studios to then go critique their work. Because the number one priority for election officials is to get it right. And there are a lot of different we're going to talk about provisional ballots. We're going to talk about mail in ballots. There's day of ballots.

There's all different ways that people vote. And some of them take a lot longer than others. And especially when we talk about the fact that election officials are really under-resourced and understaffed, their priority is getting these things right. And the last thing that an elections official in some state randomly anywhere in the country that's small and understaffed, the last thing that they want is the president of the United States tweeting about the illegitimacy of an election that they're helping to oversee or speaking about them at a press conference. So what is happening in Florida? How do we even walk through this? So right now we are on a crash course

toward three different statewide recounts. OK, we've got the commissioner of agriculture is headed toward a recount. The closest race in the state, by the way. That's true. But the two races that we were all watching on Tuesday night, at least I so I'm from St. Petersburg, Florida. So I was watching these very, very closely. We've got a governor's race between Democrat Andrew Gillum and Republican Ron DeSantis, which at the end of Tuesday night seemed like it was there was more than a half percentage point margin between the two of them, which is important. Florida law says that if if the margin between the two candidates at the end of the race is less than half a percentage point, then it automatically triggers a recount. OK, so it was above that half percentage point. But as votes have continued to be counted over the last couple of days,

it has slowly seeped down to below that half of a percentage point. And now it looks like the governor's race is going to trigger a recount. A mandatory recount, which is fascinating because Andrew Gillum conceded. But now he's like, well, we'll see what happens. He is. And it's actually been really interesting how he's played this. He hasn't really come out super strongly the way that Bill Nelson. So we're going to talk about the Senate race between Democrat Bill Nelson and Republican Rick Scott, who's the current governor. They're even in a tighter race

than Gillum and DeSantis. That has now seems to have slipped below a quarter of a percentage point margin, which triggers a recount as well, a different kind of recount, a manual hand counted recount of all the paper ballots. And I want to say one thing about concessions, because I've had a lot of people asking me, well, Gillum already conceded. Doesn't that mean something? Doesn't that mean that the race is already over? No. A concession, a suspension of a campaign, we talk a lot about that during presidential elections. Those are political terms of art. They're not legal terms whatsoever. And remember, Al Gore conceded the 2000 presidential election. He would have been perfectly fine being president had the Supreme Court ruled a different way and they found 600 votes in Florida. Right. So Gillum has conceded,

but he's also been tweeting, basically saying, I want all the votes counted and I want everyone out there to be really supporting democracy. We don't want to be cutting this process short. So basically right now where we're at is Bill Nelson and Rick Scott are tied up in a race that is less than half a percentage point, seems headed toward a manual recount. And Rick Scott, last night, gave a press conference where he basically, I don't want to say, said for sure that there's voter fraud, but he said the phrase voter fraud and strongly alluded to it, I guess would be a good way to put. Let's hear him. Tonight, I'm asking the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate this immediately.

And I am considering every single legal option available. No ragtag group of liberal activists or lawyers from D.C. will be allowed to steal this election from the voters in this great state. OK, so what is he talking about there? I know that there's been some ballots that haven't been counted, which we say is normal, but there's something going on here. Basically, Broward County and Palm Beach County have just taken longer than everywhere else in the state to count all their ballots. And people have heard of Broward County and Paul Beach County, but let's just spell it out. When we talk about Broward County, it's one of those Democratic strongholds in South Florida, on the Atlantic coast, places like Fort Lauderdale are there. And combined with Miami,

these are two of the places where Democrats really rely very heavily on their vote. And it also does take quite a while because they're pretty urban areas. They're very densely populated. Those votes take some time. And so what we're seeing is these places that just happen to have their results coming in late. And this is not a new thing, by the way. Broward County had their results come in last in the primary. But this is a normal thing for them. So it just so happens that on Tuesday night, the margins were pretty large for both the governor's race and the Senate race.

And so over the last couple of days, though, we've seen it slowly shrink and shrink and shrink. Every time that there's a new release of voting numbers, the Democratic margin there has shrunk. So something President Trump has latched onto here is that Broward County also has a pretty lengthy record of voting issues. And he talked about this today outside the White House. And before we hear this clip, let's just be clear. The president is saying a bunch of things here that he has no evidence to back up. If you look at Broward County, they have had a horrible history. 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. And Rick Scott, who won by, you know, it was close, but he won by a comfortable margin. Every couple of hours, it goes down a little bit. And then you see the people and they were involved with that fraud of the fake dossier, the phony dossier. And Miles, I want to ask you, he mentioned the president there mentioned a an official in Florida who he said was found guilty of things. Let's clear this up for people. What is he talking about and who? So he's talking about Broward election supervisor Brenda Snipes, who has gotten into some hot water over the past couple of years, maybe most famously. And he seems to be mentioning it here when we talk about this destroying of the ballots. This is a 2016 congressional race where she destroyed ballots. This is not a situation where she destroyed ballots before they were counted. It was after

they had been counted and she destroyed them. They said it was like too soon after the election. Yes, exactly. Is it normal to destroy ballots? It is normal to destroy ballots. You just have to wait a certain amount of time after an election before you can do that. And it seems like in this case in Broward County, she didn't do that. I think it's important to remember two things can be true at the same time here. Broward County can need to improve their election administration, but that doesn't necessarily mean the election officials are corrupt. So the president mentioned a couple of other things. One, that there are all these lawyers that are being sent in. It's pretty standard if there's a contested race that lawyers will be sent in. It's also pretty standard that in a race this significant and at this high level of national prominence, you're going to get the top election lawyers from Republicans and the top election lawyers from Democrats. And that's exactly what's happened. These people are rushing into Florida to fight this out. One of those people happens to have been a lawyer who was connected to the

Clinton campaign. Every recount has lawyers involved. They have to because this is a legal proceeding. And there are laws surrounding the kinds of ballots that should or should not be allowed. And that happened. We saw it with Al Franken and Norm Coleman in Minnesota, which was decided by only a few hundred votes and went on for months. That was in 2008 into 2009. One more thing on the lawyer thing. I just want to say this. If you are an elections lawyer and you've been training your whole life to be specialized in this field, what better time to use your specialty than a Florida recount? It kind of makes sense now.

What better time to be in a podcast to talk about recounts than somebody who focuses on elections and, you know, their processes? It's my dream. It's come true. So if the election was on Tuesday, why is it that votes are still being counted, much less that we might get to a recount? I think the biggest thing to look at is the provisional ballot question. So let's just start at what a provisional ballot is. It's an envelope. You show up to vote and you think you're registered and you go to your precinct and you show up, you're all excited. And they tell you that you're not registered. There is a process in place. They're not just going to send you home. They have a stack of ballots that they give you that they basically say, hey, you can vote. You just write your name, your information, everything that you think is

registered with us. It's probably our mistake. And we're going to go and take that ballot and we're going to check it against our records and see if you actually are registered. That takes a lot of time. Imagine hundreds, thousands of these envelopes, manpower has to go, or women power has to go and open these envelopes, check them against the databases. I talked to somebody today that said on the short side, when she was an election official in Arizona, the shortest amount of time to do one provisional ballot was probably five to 10 minutes. I will also add that there are also other kinds of ballots, military and overseas ballots, which tend to come in later and sometimes aren't counted until days after the election. You

have early and absentee ballots, for example. Sometimes people drop off, depending on your state's rules, you drop off early ballots, early voting ballots on the day of the election. You might not vote in person, but you drop off that ballot and that's held till later as well. And then if your absentee ballot has an issue with it, let's say your address doesn't match the address that they have on record, you as a voter have a chance to go back and rectify that before the votes are official. So there's all of these voting processes that are more than just casting the ballot on election day. Point is, it takes some time and it always takes time. The only time this becomes magnified is in close races. All right. Let's move on because there are a bunch of other races to talk about where votes are still coming in, where there

could be recounts or other things. Let's start, Miles, with Georgia. Yeah, absolutely. So this is another race that we've been following really for much of the past year. Brian Kempf, now former secretary of state of Georgia, he resigned his post yesterday up against Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor. He, at the end of Tuesday, seemed to be headed toward winning without having to go to a runoff election. A runoff election would have been necessitated had neither one of them hit this 50% threshold. At this point, Kemp is sitting right around 50.3% seems headed toward a win. But Abrams campaign is really frustrated with a lot of aspects of the way election the election administration went. They are arguing that all the provisional ballots like we talked about haven't

been counted yet. They want to make sure all the votes are counted before she concedes. But Kemp has already done his celebration. He has declared himself the winner. And he, with the current governor, have done a press conference as if he has won. The Associated Press has not called this race yet, though. I think Miles is exactly right that the Abrams campaign might not believe that they're going to win this race, but they have a lot of problems with how the election actually happened. You know, there were a lot of people in, you know, non-white areas where they were in line for far too long. We're talking about three, four, five hours is what we were hearing out of Metro,

the Metro Atlanta area. Right. And that is something that was talked about beforehand that wasn't really addressed by the state beforehand. And when President Trump was asked about it by our very own Ayesha Roscoe, he just said, look, I think it was very efficient in Georgia. And that, you know, for a president who said that he wants to be the kind of moral beacon and be on moral higher ground, he wasn't talking about voter access as being something that was of the utmost importance. I think it's really interesting to hear. Kemp was as Secretary of State in charge of election administration. And so a lot of Democrats were calling for him to recuse himself from that duty. You can make an argument one way or the other if you didn't like some of his policies, but there are a number of supervisor of elections across this country that are elected positions and a number of Secretary of States who are running for election every four years. And people aren't constantly calling for their recusal. It was just in this one situation because it's a close race. I think that specific call may have been conflating two different issues.

And Kemp has now said that if there's a recount that he would step aside, he's already stepped down as Secretary of State so that he wouldn't oversee any kind of recount there. I want to jump in one more time and say I'm not trying to necessarily defend Kemp's performance as an election administrator. He has done a lot of questionable things, notably fought tooth and nail this year to make sure that they continued using these touchscreen machines that did not give a paper record. When we talk about recounts in Florida, those are going to be recounts on paper ballots. If it came to a recount in Georgia, which it doesn't at this point look like it's going to come down to, it would be basically just checking computers. Cybersecurity experts say there's no real way

to check if there was a hack or a technological issue there. Arizona is another state, and it is a state with a Senate race where at the end of the night on Tuesday, it looked like Martha McSally, the Republican, had won the race, but it was too close to call. And as the hours have passed, at least for now, Kyrsten Sinema, the Democrat, is in the lead by not very many votes. That's right. Kyrsten Sinema is up by about 9000 votes, a little more than 9000 votes. And the Arizona secretary of state has decided that it needs to clarify for people just how their election is run. So if you go to their Web site right now, you will see an explainer right at the front about why it's taking so long to count the votes and why there are all these votes that are coming in. Because I think a lot of people who are on social media might be seeing memes going around saying, you don't just find 500,000 votes, for example, is one that keeps getting passed around. Well, they didn't find the votes. The votes were always there. They hadn't been

counted yet. Let's move to California, where a huge share of voters now vote by mail. Right. And where it takes just a long time for all of those ballots to get counted. Yeah, there were like half a dozen competitive House races. There are still about a dozen House races nationwide that haven't been called yet. And those are still taking some time. So right now, I think we need to really make clear here that Democrats have already won a net of 30 seats in the House and they're leading in six or seven others. So the Democratic wave and make no mistake in the House, it was a Democratic blue wave to get to 30 seats and it's 30 seats and possibly up to

36, 37 at the end of the day. And just for scale, California, when I checked this morning, four million votes left to be counted. Four million votes. Oh, my gosh. That's like more votes than entire other states. It's a big state. Wow. OK, so that will take some time. And and I guess the lesson from this is, as you sort of mentioned, is like the perception of the election on election night can change in the days following. It always does change. And by the way, it changed in the 2016 presidential election, too, when a lot of people were looking at voter turnout totals and seeing, you know, where Hillary Clinton was matching up with Barack Obama. I was one of those people looking at those numbers. And a week or so later, it actually wound up that she did far

better than a lot of people saw on election night in the popular vote. Right. And I think something that's interesting here when we talk about election officials and the speed that they're working here. I talked to somebody today who said elections can be two of three things. You can have them affordable, you can have them fast, and you can have them accurate. You get to pick two of the three. You make the decision. I pick accurate. I'd like to have accurate as one of those. Yeah, me too. And affordable may or may not be a choice because, you know, funding being what it is. Yes, absolutely. It's constantly a struggle. All right. Well, we will be back in your podcast feed as soon as there's a political headline that you need to know about.

But for now, I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And just a quick note, we want to say goodbye to our superb producer, Chloe Weiner. What? I know. Where's she going? She had been with us in the lead up to the election, but she is not going to be with us anymore.

So, Chloe, we miss you already. And shout out to Chloe for all of her fact checking, not just in this podcast, but also on our election briefing book, because it was awesome. Thanks, Chloe. Thanks for having our back. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.