Florida & Georgia

[BoSoxGal]

So both states are still counting votes.

In Georgia Abrams won't concede (rightfully) and is hoping for a forced run-off once all the votes are counted. Meanwhile evidence has emerged of hundreds of voting machines that were locked up in storage facilities while voters waited hours in line to vote at the handful available at many polling places. Kemp is a cheater.

In Florida a number of federal lawsuits are pending on various aspects of the vote counting process; meanwhile the Republicans are accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election just because they want to have ALL the absentee, military and provisional ballots counted. WHAT THE FUCK?! I keep thinking they can't go any lower, and then they do!!

Anyway, I'm ridiculously excited that there is still hope for a Governor Gillum and Senator Nelson. I'd especially like to see that ugly snake Rick Scott retired from active politics.

[Big RR]

So I guess it's safe to say you don't believe Trump's allegations f voter fraud? FWIW, I doubt anyone really does except for the doublethinkers.

[Lord Jim]

I'm ridiculously excited that there is still hope for a Governor Gillum and Senator Nelson.

Probably more hope for Nelson than for Gillum, looking at the vote spreads...

Things also remain up in the air in the Arizona Senate race....

For some reason there are still several 100 thousand ballots left to count, and Felicity Smoak Kyrsten Sinema has pulled ahead of Martha McSally:

Sinema takes very thin lead over McSally in Arizona Senate race



(CNN)Democratic US Rep. Kyrsten Sinema has pulled slightly ahead of Republican Rep. Martha McSally in the close race for US Senate in Arizona.

As of a few minutes before 8 p.m. ET Thursday, Sinema held a slim lead with 49.1% of the vote, while McSally was right behind with 48.6% of the vote, with 83% of the vote reported, CNN results show. Nearly 9,000 votes separate McSally from Sinema.

Sinema's lead comes after roughly 127,000 votes in Maricopa County -- the state's most populous county, which includes Phoenix -- were counted Thursday. Thousands of votes still remain to be counted in the state.
Individual counties in Arizona will continue to update their vote counts periodically until ballots are certified.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/08/politics ... index.html

(Personally, if I could wave a magic wand, I would gladly have swapped a McSally victory for a Cruz defeat...)

When all is said and done, it's entirely possible that the GOP could wind up with just 52 seats; only one more than they had going into the election (despite a huge advantage in terms of which seats were up) and the exact same number of seats that they had in the previous Congress prior to the special election for Jeff Sessions seat...

The Georgia Gubernatorial situation is interesting, because Abrams doesn't need to overcome Kemp's vote total (which she can't mathematically do) but just have him drop below 50% to trigger a one-on-one runoff...(He's currently at 50.3%...a Libertarian candidate also pulled a couple of percentage points)

Stay tuned...

[Econoline]

Andy Borowitz nails it, again.

• RICK SCOTT ACCUSES DEMOCRATS OF TRYING TO THWART G.O.P.’s SUCCESSFUL VOTER SUPPRESSION
  By Andy Borowitz | 11:05 A.M.
  
  TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA (The Borowitz Report)—In a hastily called press conference on Thursday evening, Florida Governor Rick Scott accused Democrats of nefariously plotting to undo the Republican Party’s highly successful voter-suppression effort.
  
  “As Republicans, we have worked tirelessly to intimidate, discourage, and otherwise disenfranchise millions of Florida voters,” a visibly enraged Scott said. “We are not about to let Democrats swoop in at the last minute and ruin all of that fine work.”
  
  Scott angrily singled out the Broward County and Palm Beach County supervisors for their “rampant enforcement of the right to vote.”
  
  “They are literally finding votes by people we are a hundred per cent sure we had scared away from the voting booths,” he said. “This will not stand.”
  
  The Florida governor said that if Democrats think that they can undermine the Republicans’ arduous and painstaking efforts to suppress votes in Florida, “they better think again.”
  
  “I will not sit idly by while every vote is counted,” Scott said. “This is Florida, goddammit.”

[BoSoxGal]

COUNT THE VOTES - ALL THE DAMNED VOTES!!!!

[eddieq]

Did nobody learn anything from the 2000 presidential election?

[rubato]

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4 ... -in-az-sen

Sinema expanded her lead over McSally to 28,688 votes out of more than 2.1 million cast, a margin of 1.35 percentage points.

AFAICT Sinema's lead has become insurmountable.

yrs,
rubato

[Guinevere]

Sinema declared the winner in AZ! That blue wave keeps rolling....

[ex-khobar Andy]

At least in Florida, veterans with absentee ballots have to have them postmarked by election day from wherever they are in the world, and they must be received in their voting precinct (if that's the right word) by 10 days after the election which is Nov 16.

While I doubt that military votes will tend to the Democratic party (if traditional wisdom means anything) they should all be counted. Trump wants the votes to be tallied as of now.

From WaPo: (It's a longer article: I have just copied the first four paragraphs)

Trump is telling Florida to ignore military ballots. Happy Veterans Day.

Early Monday morning, after returning from a European commemoration of the end of World War I and as Americans awoke to observe the Veterans Day holiday, President Trump announced a bold new strategy: refusing to recognize the votes of U.S. service members stationed overseas.

“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 many ballots are missing or forged,” the commander in chief tweeted. “An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”

Trump, who has long argued without evidence that there was widespread voting fraud in the election that he won in 2016, was riffing off the tune played by Scott, Florida’s sitting governor, who leads his race to unseat incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson by less than 13,000 votes out of nearly 8.2 million votes counted. The slow pace of counting mail-in votes, particularly in urban (and blue-leaning) counties such as Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, has led Scott to claim on Fox News — against the opinion of Florida’s top law enforcement agency — that “Sen. Nelson is trying to commit fraud to win this election.” What evidence does Scott have? None, other than that the offending South Florida counties “came up with 93,000 votes after election night. We still don’t know how they came up with that.”

As it happens, we do know where those votes came from: Among other sources, many of the ballots that arrive after Election Day are cast by military service members, contractors and dependents deployed overseas. Scott — a Navy veteran whose own administration snubbed several Florida-born Medal of Honor recipients to nominate him for the state’s new Military Hall of Fame in 2011 — should have known that from his time aboard a Pacific-based frigate. Indeed, the state he represents is one of the friendliest states of the union when it comes to accommodating overseas and military voters: It requires ballots to be sent to deployed service members at least 45 days before Election Day, and it counts those votes as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day and received in the voter’s home county within 10 days of the election — in this case, Nov. 16. Florida, in fact, has historically had a higher percentage of military personnel request and return mail-in ballots than any other state in the union.

[Big RR]

I'd love to see those ballots he claims are forged, or what evidence he has of any ballots "missing", except none of either exists. If you allege fraud, you should be prepared to prove it, but ordinary rules don't apply to bigmouthed blowhards.

[Sue U]

the offending South Florida counties “came up with 93,000 votes after election night. We still don’t know how they came up with that.”

Would someone please explain the US Postal Service to Gov. Scott?