Republicans in Florida Are Running Every Play From Their 2000 Recount Playbook

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

14 November 18

The people covering these recounts shouldn't fall for the same tricks.

efore we get to Florida, as we inevitably must, because democracy, the two most important races currently in extra innings outside of the Dingbat State are taking place in Arizona and Georgia.

In Arizona, where the votes are still being counted, Democratic candidate Katie Hobbs has retaken the lead over Republican Steve Gaynor for secretary of state. The AP called this race for Gaynor on election night, but as the votes continued to roll in, Hobbs gradually ate up his 44,000-vote lead until, now, she leads him by a few hundred. Gaynor, it should be noted, is a voter-suppressing hardbar who thinks all ballots should be printed only in English. (This is in plain violation of what's left of the Voting Rights Act.) (Moreover, he said it in front of a fringe right-wing "Patriot" gathering.)

Meanwhile, in Georgia, the race to succeed Brian Kemp—currently trying to hang onto the lead he suppressed himself into in the governor's race—as that state's SoS has gone to a runoff election to be held on December 4. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Barrow has talked more of using the office as a bully pulpit to rail against gerrymandering and to quickly move the state to un-hackable paper ballots. Raffensperger has vowed to continue many of Kemp’s policies, including canceling registrations of voters who hadn’t participated in recent elections. The too-close-to-call governor race has sucked up any attention that would otherwise go to this down-ticket contest, but that could soon change as counties prepare to certify votes this week.

I trust I don't have to emphasize how important the office of the secretary of state has become at the state level, given what we've seen of the ongoing attack on the franchise by national and local Republican officials up to and including the President* of the United States. Which brings us, inevitably, to Florida.

This is an absolute lie from a man who lies absolutely. It's also a grotesque abuse of power, if anyone on the next House Judiciary Committee is taking notes. Nevertheless, as The New York Times reports, the Republicans have dusted off an old playbook and they're running every play in it.

Mr. Scott and his allies have tried to portray the Senate election as a fait accompli—he is currently ahead by about 13,000 votes — and the recount as a futile attempt to prolong the inevitable. Indeed, between 2000 and 2016, there were 4,687 statewide general elections and just 26 statewide recounts. Only three—or 0.06 percent of all statewide elections—reversed the initial result, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan group FairVote...

But the Republicans’ posture on the recount—especially the party’s claims of fraud and cover-up and President Trump’s latest assertion on Monday of forgery, all presented without evidence—has been deeply divisive and even drew a stern rebuke Monday from the chief state judge in Broward County, Fla., Jack Tuter. He urged lawyers involved in the battle over the recount to “ramp down the rhetoric” and take any accusations of electoral fraud to the police.

The Republicans’ strategy in Florida reflects their experience in the 2000 presidential recount in the state. Party strategists and lawyers say they prevailed largely because they approached it as they did the race itself, with legal, political and public relations components that allowed them to outmaneuver the Democrats, who were less strategic and consistent with their lawsuit targets and public remarks about the recount.

Nobody who was alive then can dispute that latter assertion. Because they were prepared to use all means, fair and foul, to hand the country the second-worst president of the past 18 years, the Republicans brilliantly set the stage for their ultimate legal triumph—an utterly illegitimate Supreme Court decision that was so shameful that its authors specifically said that it could never be used as precedent for anything.

But it was the Republican groundwork laid in the streets and election offices in Florida that allowed the Court to come stumbling in for the save. And it was Democratic bumfuzzlement at key moments that helped the process along. Remember vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman's submarining the Gore effort by saying that all military ballots, even if they were filled out in crayon and arrived weeks after the deadline, should be counted? That was a gift from the dark gods of Spin to James Baker and all the ancillary ratfckers under his command. (Ironically, of course, the Republicans, including the president*, are making exactly the opposite case this time around. Them rats won't fck themselves.)

The goal of the extralegal strategy in 2000 was to delegitimize a fairly simple recount procedure by creating the illusion of a circus. If everybody played by the rules, Gore would have won the state. The Florida legislature would've appointed its own set of Republican electors and the state would have sent two sets to Washington. The House of Representatives, then in the hands of a Republican majority, would have accepted the Republican slate of electors and C-Plus Augustus would've been president anyway but, at least, we would have had a constitutional crisis according to, you know, the Constitution.

But, instead, we had cultivated chaos that gave the illusion of a fiasco, which, alas for the country, the elite political press covered as reality. When the lasting memory of a seminal event like the 2000 election is not a completely bogus Supreme Court decision but, rather, a picture of a bald guy looking at a ballot through a magnifying glass, you have to conclude that the "political and public relations components" worked pretty damn well.

All of which is to caution the people covering these recounts not to make the same mistake this time around. So far, both the local Florida judges and the Democratic side of the argument are doing much better. But as much in love with History Repeating Itself as the elite political press might be, the 2000 recount wasn't a game and it was carefully manufactured to look like a fiasco. Too many people fell for that. It would be helpful if they didn't this time around.