Faithless Elections

In the weeks following the 2016 Presidential Election, a group of Hollywood celebrities put out an ad trying to convince members of the Electoral College pledged to vote for President Trump to break their pledge and become “faithless electors.” In the past, faithless electors have had little to no effect on the outcome of the electoral vote total.  In 2004, a faithless elector pledged to vote for John Kerry opted instead to vote for John Edwards, Kerry’s running mate; likely by accident.  In 2000, an elector from Washington D.C. abstained to protest the city’s lack of a voting representative in Congress.   In 2016, in the wake of massive establishment opposition to President Trump, liberals hoped that the number of faithless electors would dramatically increase.  In reality, only two members of the Electoral College decided to take the advice of the Hollywood celebrities, one faithless elector in Texas voted for Ron Paul while another voted for John Kasich.  Believe it or not, more faithless electors deflected from Hillary Clinton than President Trump, with three electors from Washington State supporting Former Secretary of State Colin Powell while a fourth elector supported Faith Spotted Eagle.  In Hawaii, one of the electors voted for Bernie Sanders. 

 

Fast forwarding two years, Ann Coulter wrote an obviously sarcastic tweet reminding conservatives to vote on November 6, while telling liberals “your polling day is Nov. 7.” Unfortunately, it looks like the Democrats may have taken her advice seriously.  While Fox News projected that the Democrats would retake control of the House early in the evening before Californians had even stopped voting, it looked like Republicans would only suffer minimal losses in the House.  Based on the Election night results, it looked like Republicans would hold onto a majority of seats in California. After Republican Yvette Herrell had already given a victory speech after looking like the clear winner of the Congressional race in New Mexico’s 2^nd Congressional District on Election night, absentee ballots found the next day put her Democratic challenger over the top.  Herrell has refused to concede; she has expressed concerns about “voter integrity.”  With election night nearly two weeks in the rearview mirror, Republicans ended up losing six seats in California. 

 

No place has demonstrated more incompetence when it comes to counting votes than South Florida.  Broward County, Florida, has a long history of mismanaging elections, dating all the way back to 2000; where it became ground zero of the Bush v. Gore recount effort that delayed the announcement of a winner in the 2000 Presidential Election by five weeks.  Florida implemented numerous changes to its election laws in an effort to make sure that the 2000 fiasco did not repeat itself.  Nationwide, Congress passed the “Help America Vote Act,” which included the establishment of provisional ballots and attempted to rectify election problems at the state level by establishing the Election Assistance Commission.  Shortly after the 2000 Presidential election, then-Governor Jeb Bush fired the Broward County Supervisor of Elections and appointed Brenda Snipes to that position.  Snipes has won re-election four times to her position as a Democrat, not a Republican; despite what some geniuses on MSNBC may tell you. Snipes came under scrutiny in 2016, when Former DNC Chair and United States Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, faced a primary challenge from Tim Canova, a Bernie Sanders supporter. Wasserman-Schultz, whose district contains parts of Broward County, had a powerful ally in Snipes, who destroyed all the paper ballots from the election, as Canova expressed concerns about the validity of the election results; calling them “potentially implausible.” 

 

Considering all of this history, it should have surprised no one that Broward County caused great embarrassment to the Sunshine State during the 2018 election season.  Florida law requires that all counties report the results of their absentee ballots within thirty minutes of the polls closing.  Broward County failed to comply with this law.  On Election night, Republican Senate candidate and outgoing Governor Rick Scott had a lead of roughly 57,000 votes over Democratic Senator Bill Nelson while Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron Desantis led his Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum by a slightly larger margin.  However, a handful of absentee ballots began to appear in Broward County well beyond the deadline for reporting absentee ballots.  These ballots narrowed Scott’s margin to 12,000 votes or roughly 0.15 percentage points; enough to trigger a machine recount and a subsequent hand recount. Desantis’s margin also narrowed quite a bit to around 38,000 votes or 0.41 percentage points.  It did not take long for Marc Elias, a Hillary Clinton hack who had successfully caused a Republican Election night lead to vanish into thin air in the 2008 Minnesota Senate election, to descend on Florida hoping to deliver the race to Nelson. 

 

In addition to Broward County, election officials in Palm Beach County also demonstrated enormous ineptitude.  The machine recount began last Sunday and the Secretary of State ordered all 67 counties to submit the results of their machine recounts by 3:00 p.m. on Thursday.  All but two counties complied with the request.  Palm Beach County made it clear that they could not complete the machine recount in time because of malfunctioning equipment.  Broward County, which found itself the subject of a tremendous amount of scrutiny, proudly announced ten minutes before the 3 p.m. deadline that it had met the deadline.  However, it did not actually upload the results of the machine recount until 3:02 p.m; two minutes after the deadline.  Many see this “mistake” as an intentional act of sabotage after Scott’s lead in Broward County actually increased following the recount.  Because Broward County failed to meet the deadline, the numbers did not change.

 

Following the machine recount, a hand recount began for the Senate race.  At this point, the gubernatorial race basically came to an end; since the machine recount found no significant change in the vote tally and Ron DeSantis became the Governor-Elect.  In the hand recount, election officials will decide what to do about previously rejected ballots; known as “under” or “over” votes.  In the hand recount, election officials attempt to play psychic and decipher the intention of voters who voted for two candidates for the same race, did not vote for a candidate for a particular race, or did not follow the proper directions for filling out the ballot.  All counties had to submit the results of their hand recounts by noon on Sunday.

 

Fortunately, the recount process has officially come to an end.  Scott has become the Senator-elect while Desantis has become Governor-elect.  Both Nelson and Gillum have conceded.  The Democrats’ dream of turning Florida into the new California failed to materialize, at least for now.  In addition, the embattled Snipes announced her intention to resign, effective January 4; leaving it up to future Governor DeSantis to pick her replacement.

 

In addition to the chaos in Florida, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, Stacey Abrams, refused to concede; even though her path to victory looked impossible.  Abrams had the support of Oprah Winfrey and the entire Democratic establishment yet she could not manage to beat Republican Brian Kemp, the Georgia Secretary of State whom the left has tarred with relentless accusations of voter suppression. However, her allies quickly accused Republicans of playing dirty in the election.  Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who had just run re-election in a purple state days earlier, said that “if Stacey Abrams doesn’t win in Georgia, they stole it.” Hillary Clinton, who still has not accepted the results of the 2016 Presidential Election, declared that “if she had a fair election, she already would have won,” apparently forgetting that the far-left Abrams hoped to become governor of Georgia, not Massachusetts.

 

Abrams appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union,” where host Jake Tapper repeatedly tried to get her to call Kemp the legitimate Governor of Georgia but she refused, only referring to him as “the legal Governor.”  In her refusal to acknowledge Kemp as the legitimate Governor of Georgia, Abrams took a page out of Georgia Congressman John Lewis’s playbook.  Lewis had told NBC’s Chuck Todd ahead of President Trump’s inauguration that he did not view President Trump as a legitimate President because of Russian interference.

 

Two weeks after Election Day, five races still remain uncalled.  In spite of this, orientation for new members of Congress has already taken place and a handful of Congressional candidates took part in the orientation despite the fact that they had not officially won their races. A total of nine candidates in undecided races participated in orientation.  Wouldn’t it make more sense to either wait until after all the vote counting has completed or figure out a way to count the ballots faster before holding orientation?

  

With elections like these, who needs Russia? It looks like the incompetence of has done more to shake Americans’ faith in democracy than anything the increasingly irrelevant Kremlin could have ever dreamed of.  

 

I have decided to offer some advice on how to restore faith in American elections: Every state in the union should follow Florida’s lead, if they have not already, and require counties to submit the results of the absentee ballots within thirty minutes of the polls closing.  Candidates on all sides of the aisle have already had a grueling and exhausting election season; it makes no sense to extend the counting of ballots beyond Election Day, unless, of course, state law requires a runoff if no candidate receives 50 percent of the vote.  Delaying the counting of absentee ballots only opens the door to voter fraud.  My second piece of advice: limit and/or abolish provisional ballots.  When election officials cannot verify the validity of a voter or the voter shows up at the wrong place, they allow the voter to cast a provisional ballot.  In the age of the internet, little excuses exist for not knowing where to vote. Once again, provisional ballots only open the door to voter fraud. Finally, considering the fact that a liberal state like Rhode Island requires voter IDs, it makes no sense for every other state in the union not to require them. 

 

With less than 700 days to go until the 2020 election, which will include a Presidential election, hopefully election officials across America have learned from the horrendous mistakes made by Broward County, not just this year, but in the past.  Not learning from these mistakes will only further shake Americans’ faith in democracy, already eroded by the corrupt and biased mainstream media pounding the drumbeat of Russian collusion 24/7, and thus continue the plague of “faithless elections.”