Today, Explained - Total Recount

Episode Date: November 12, 2018

Almost a week after the midterm elections, several key races remain undecided and recounts are coming. The president calls shenanigans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's show is brought to you by KiwiCo, because it's the holiday season, so now we've got stuff about gift ideas. KiwiCo creates cool, hands-on projects for kids of all ages that make learning about science and technology and engineering and art and math fun. If your kid doesn't find it fun, I guess. They're offering today, Explain Listeners, the chance to try KiwiCo for free. Check it out and learn more at KiwiCo.com slash Explained. Tara Gulshan, you're a politics reporter here at Vox. The midterms are just under a day from being a week old, and we're still counting votes in some very important races.

Let's start with Florida. What's going on with the governor's race there? So the Florida governor's race is between Andrew Gillum, who's this young progressive mayor of Tallahassee. He's trying to be the first African-American governor of Florida. And he's up against Ron DeSantis, this conservative, also young, congressman who is a huge fan of Trump and also came under a lot of

scrutiny for having reportedly ties to white nationalists. And at first it was looking like DeSantis was going to win this thing to the point where Andrew Gillum even went on stage and gave this kind of tearful concession speech. But I can, I can, I can guarantee you this. I'm not going anywhere. We're going to fight. And then over the week, when the first tallies came in by Saturday, the first deadline in Florida, Gillum actually closed in on DeSantis to 0.41 percent. And under Florida law, that means that it will trigger a machine recount. And obviously, at this point, Gillum kind of retracted his concession. I am replacing my words of concession with an uncompromised and unapologetic call that we count every single vote. We count every vote. And I say this recognizing that my fate in this may or may not change.

Is the tightening happening in specific parts of Florida or are the mail-in ballots coming from all over? What's going on exactly? So a lot of the ballots that were being counted after election day were coming from the most populous counties of Florida, which are in the southeastern parts of the state. So this is like the Miami metropolitan area. And those took the longest to count. So those are also areas that are strong democratically held counties. So that's why the lead kind of kept shrinking and shrinking for DeSantis. Yeah.

So overseeing everything going on in Florida is the governor, Rick Scott, who's also involved in the Senate race. What's going on there? So the Senate race is even closer. It's between Senator Bill Nelson. He's the incumbent Democrat and Governor Rick Scott, who's a Republican challenger. Scott had this very narrow lead that, again, over the week just became narrower, and it's 0.14%. Wow. So not only does that trigger a recount, but in Florida, if your margin of victory is less than a quarter of a percentage point, it triggers something called a manual recount.

And that means that any time a ballot is submitted and the machine recognizes it as either something called an undervote, which means that a contest was left empty, or an overvote, which there's more than the allotted number of candidates selected in a contest, then those ballots are then counted by hand. And this is super important in the Senate race because of one county. It's called Broward County. It has a bit of a history, yeah? It does. It's the second most populous county in Florida. It's the metropolitan area around Miami, again. And it's this huge Democratic stronghold. Like I said before, this is a county where Bill Nelson is leading by 38 points. And something mysterious happened in Broward County. There were a lot of undervotes in the Senate race, meaning either a lot of people just for some reason left the ballot empty for the Senate race. Or there was some error in the machine tabulation that missed people's votes. Some people have been saying that it's because of how the ballot is designed.

Check it out. In Hillsborough County, voter instruction appears at the top and in the center of the ballot. But in Broward County, voter instructions were positioned on the left side, leaving the race for U.S. Senate under those instructions, towards the bottom of the ballot. But if you ask even Senator Bill Nelson's lawyers, they're like, we don't think that that could amount to how many undervotes there were in this race. And we're talking about roughly 25,000 undervotes. They're saying that if we do a hand recount, we'll see that this was actually some kind of tabulation error, that the machines missed this or something happened where there are actually more votes for our candidate here that were just missed. So have these recounts in both the gubernatorial and Senate races,

have they begun in earnest or are these still theoretical? They have begun in earnest. The deadline for the state is Thursday. And that is kind of a big deal because it's a lot of work to retabulate all of these ballots. And in Florida, if they can't meet that deadline, then the official result just reverts back to what the first tally was. And already we're hearing Republican parties in different counties saying, all right, well, if that happens, which would likely happen in the most populous counties and those counties are Democratic, then that's good for us, right? Because if it just reverts back to the old results, then the Republicans will likely do better than if a recount were to happen there.

Of course, the only other outstanding gubernatorial race in the country is in Georgia, where Stacey Abrams still hasn't conceded defeat to Brian Kemp. What's going on there? This is another really hotly contested race. Brian Kemp is until last week is the Secretary of State in Georgia. In other words, it was his job to oversee these elections, including the one that he is running in. So currently, Brian Kemp is leading. But Stacey Abrams' campaign is really pushing for all of the votes to be counted, and they will continue to be counted this week. She will need roughly 19,000 votes to trigger a recount in the state, and she would need a little bit more than 20,000 votes to actually send the

race into a runoff. Because in Georgia, if neither candidate can get 50% of the vote plus one vote, then the race will automatically go to a runoff, which would be another election, kind of a do-over on December 4th. And does Stacey Abrams expect different results if there's a runoff? Why exactly is she fighting for that? So there have been a lot of allegations of voter suppression and voter access problems in Georgia. A lot of that has been coming down to Kemp himself just because he's been in the position of overseeing the elections. Civil rights groups are suing Kemp for putting more than 53,000 voter registration applications on hold, mostly from minority voters. For Stacey Abrams, not only does her campaign say that there are more outstanding votes than

the Secretary of State office is currently reporting. But she also has been making a big case about whether or not voters had proper access to vote, to register to vote. All things that have been kind of boiling over in the weeks before Election Day and even now. And I guess the last outstanding race we should talk about is in Arizona, where I'm not so sure there's likely to be a recount, but things are still being decided, right? Right. So in Arizona, the race is between Republican Martha McSally and Democrat Kristen Sinema. And this is the race to fill retiring Senator Jeff Flake's seat. First, it looked like Martha McSally had the lead. But again, we saw here as more of the votes were counted in some of the largest counties in Arizona, like Maricopa County, where Phoenix is, that Sinema not only closed the gap, but actually started leading. And she has now amassed a pretty sizable lead where even some election watchers are thinking that she is going to be a winner here. And we're just waiting for the rest of the ballots to be counted throughout this week. So all in all, you've got these four

major races that are getting a lot of attention across the country. Are these recounts and waiting games going to change the results from what people expected last Tuesday? Every one of these races is slightly different. I will say when it comes to recounts, it's very rare that they actually do change the results, but it's not completely out of the question. An analysis by FiveThirtyEight a couple of years ago showed that between 2000 and 2015, there were 27 recounts in statewide races and only three of those recounts changed the actual final result. in states like Florida, when we have these undervotes and in large numbers, more than the actual difference between the candidates, there is a possibility here. And we can't discount that. Coming up, the president calls conspiracy.

I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. If your kid doesn't find learning about stuff like, I don't know, Steam fun, your kid can try out KiwiCo, which creates these hands-on projects that make learning about Steam fun. KiwiCo projects are designed to spark creativity, tinkering, and learning in kids of all ages. KiwiCo makes the perfect gift for kids in your life. Each month they'll receive a fun, engaging new project which will help develop their creativity and confidence. And KiwiCo has six lines of projects to choose from and they just added a new one called the Eureka Crate designed for ages 14 to 104. Sorry to all

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How are both parties dealing with these close races? In general, Democrats in Arizona and Florida and Georgia, they want to keep counting votes. They want as many ballots to be counted as possible because I think they believe that the more votes are counted, the better the outcome will look for them. Rick Scott's margin in the Florida Senate race has continued to shrink. Democratic Senator Bill Nelson has been catching up the more votes that have been counted. So I think they just want to keep counting votes because they think that will be beneficial for them in the end. Republicans, on the other hand, they're trying to challenge as many ballots from being counted as they can. They're trotting out allegations of voter fraud. We have boxes of votes just appearing out of nowhere. And malfeasance on the part of state and local elections officials.

We have Brenda Snipes, who obviously has been sued successfully by a primary opponent to Debbie Wasserman Schultz for shenanigans that happened there years ago. Republicans feel, you know, on election night, we won these elections. It's time to stop counting votes and having all these shenanigans that seem to be shrinking our margins. Let's just declare ourselves the winners and move on. Just to be clear, they won these elections based on projections, and now the actual votes are being fully counted, right? It's like the system's set up so that we have an idea who won, but when they're close, we count more precisely. That's how the system works? Yes, that is how the system works. It is confusing because, you know, you'll see on election night, you know, CNN and the news channels will be reporting that 100% of the votes

are in, but that's not exactly true because you still have mail-in ballots, you have provisional ballots for people who might have had some issue when they got to the voting booth. And so, yeah, we continue counting votes for absentee and provisional ballots and those are just as legitimate votes as the ones that are cast on Election Day and it's a very meticulous process to try to count each one of these over the last week. Are the Republican candidates across the board in these four unresolved races claiming foul play or what? Not all of the Republican candidates have been claiming foul play. In Florida, Rick Scott,

I think, has been sort of the poster child of the Republican candidates who just want to move on, who want to stop the vote counting that's been underway over the last week, declare themselves the winner and move on, who want to stop the vote counting that's been underway over the last week, declare themselves the winner and move on. Every day since the election, the left wing activists in Broward County have been coming up with more and more ballots out of nowhere. Every person in Florida knows exactly what is happening. Their goal is to keep mysteriously finding more votes until the election turns out the way they want. He has more or less accused the Nelson campaign of encouraging voter fraud. Every Floridian should be concerned there may be rampant fraud happening in Palm Beach and Broward counties.

And the Broward supervisor of elections, Brenda Snipes, has a history of acting in absolute bad faith. He said that liberal Democrats are coming down from Washington to try to steal this election from him. I will not sit idly by while unethical liberals try to steal this election from the great people of Florida. And so he has really, really embraced this idea that there's some kind of shenanigans going on and that this is all a plot by Democrats to steal an election that he won fairly. In Arizona, I think it's notable that the Republican candidate in that Senate race, Martha McSally, has not used the same kind of rhetoric about her race that Rick Scott has used in Florida. And the Republican governor, Doug Ducey, and the Republican secretary of state have been very careful to say that Arizona is just doing its due diligence. There are a lot of mail-in

ballots used in that state. And so it's perfectly natural for the state to take this long to count all of the votes. It seems like the decent thing to do in our democracy to say, like, let's wait till all these votes are finally counted and we'll have a result before long. It makes you wonder when waiting to count all the votes became politically divisive. But then you go look at the president's Twitter feed and there are at least 10 tweets claiming conspiracy. Yeah, I mean, President Trump has has embraced the idea of voter fraud for years, and he has certainly stepped up to the moment, so to speak, with these contested elections in Florida and Arizona and has not hesitated to accuse Democrats of trying to rig the elections. 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. Rather than try to calm things down and instill faith in the process, the president seems happy to undermine people's faith in our electoral processes.

And just to give the listeners a taste, in case they haven't seen it this morning, he tweeted, The Florida election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and it's got more replies than it's got retweets, because I'm guessing that was pretty divisive. What else has he been saying since last Tuesday? There are a couple of counties in Florida where there have been recurring, you know, issues with elections and with votes being counted. And so he's targeted Broward County and Palm Beach County down in Florida. 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 in Arizona? Out of the wilderness, they find a lot of votes and she's, the other candidate is just winning by a hair. One of the difficult things about mail-in ballots is you want to verify, of course, that the person who sent in the ballot is also the person who's actually registered to vote. And so there's a question about trying to match the signatures that are on the ballots with the signatures that we have on

record of the people who allegedly filed those votes. And President Trump has seized on the idea that there's some kind of mismatch in the signatures and has ran with the idea that that suggests some kind of rampant voter fraud in the election. I could see how there'd be some issues with that. I mean, a lot of people's signatures just don't match because they're ill-practiced or in a rush. Has there been any pushback from Democrats on this? Yes. What the Democrats are alleging is that election officials in Florida are using basically too restrictive of a process to confirm those votes, which will lead to valid votes being tossed out. And they've argued that this actually amounts to an unconstitutional violation of a person's due process rights. One example that

people might have already seen is there's a former Florida congressman named Patrick Murphy. His ballot was invalidated for signature mismatch this election, saying voters like him are being disenfranchised. So if his vote wasn't counted, it makes you wonder how many hundreds or thousands of votes that should be counted have not been because of this signature matching process. Is there anything out there in Arizona or Georgia or Florida to suggest that there is some sort of mass voter fraud going on in any of these races? No. It's a very simple answer. No. Rick Scott actually appointed some election washers to go down to these counties that have a history of some maybe less than ideal processes for counting votes. And, you know, those election observers, other state officials who are in charge of overseeing elections in Florida, none of them have alleged any kind of wrongdoing and certainly not the sort of systematic malfeasance that would be necessary

to swing an election where right now the two candidates are separated by about 13,000 votes. I think that's what makes this so unnerving. You know, it would have been one thing for Republicans to say, we think we won or even we know we won, but we're going to be vigilant about overseeing the counting process. And we believe at the end of it, we are going to still come out victorious. But rather than take that more of it, we are going to still come out victorious. But rather than take that more measured approach, which we have seen Republicans adopt in Arizona, they've just ran with this idea of voter fraud and Democrats trying to steal elections. Is there a real lost opportunity here to have functioning democracy? I mean, it's the highest midterm turnout since the 60s, I read, and yet we've got this high turnout and engaged electorate.

And with it, what are we doing? Advocating for not counting all of the votes in various states? I certainly think that this was an opportunity for public officials and for the candidates to sort of rise to the moment. You know, I think what we look for in our leaders in moments like this is calm, is a measured response, and is people trying to instill faith in our institutions and our electoral processes. Instead of that, we have the President of the United States, we have the Governor of Florida, and we have other people with national platforms and profiles undermining faith in the process, accusing people without evidence of trying to steal elections. And, you know, if you're just a voter, you know, who lives in rural Florida or in, you know, the middle of Miami, you're not going to know what to make of

this. All you know is that the most famous people and the people in the highest elected offices in your state and the land are saying that elections are rigged and being stolen. And so like, how would you walk away from that having any faith that your vote matters and that the outcome of the elections is actually valid and authentic? If you're looking to buy a gift for a young person in your life this holiday season, check out KiwiCo. They got these hands-on projects for kids of all ages that make learning about science and technology and engineering and art and math fun. Not to say that learning about those things aren't fun,

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