An implausable number of people in Broward Co., Florida didn't vote for Senate
31 replies, posted
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/something-looks-weird-in-broward-county-heres-what-we-know-about-a-possible-florida-recount/
The Florida U.S. Senate race is still too close to call. According to unofficial results on the Florida Department of State website at 11:45 a.m. Eastern on Friday, Nov. 9, Republican Gov.
Rick Scott led Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson by 15,046 votes — or 0.18 percentage points. We’re watching that margin closely because if it stays about that small, it will trigger a
recount. It’s already narrowed since election night, when Scott initially declared victory with a 56,000-vote lead.
The changing margin is due to continued vote-counting in Broward and Palm Beach counties, two of Florida’s largest and more Democratic-leaning counties. On Thursday evening, the
supervisors of elections in the two counties told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that vote counting there was mostly complete.
Unusually, the votes tabulated in Broward County so far exhibit a high rate of something called “undervoting,” or not voting in all the races on the ballot. Countywide, 26,060 fewer
votes were cast in the U.S. Senate race than in the governor race.1 Put another way, turnout in the Senate race was 3.7 percent lower than in the gubernatorial race.
Broward County’s undervote rate is way out of line with every other county in Florida, which exhibited, at most, a 0.8-percent difference. (There is one outlier — the sparsely populated
Liberty County — where votes cast in the Senate race were 1 percent higher than in the governor race, but there we’re talking about a difference of 26 votes, not more than 26,000, as is
the case in Broward.)
To put in perspective what an eye-popping number of undervotes that is, more Broward County residents voted for the down-ballot constitutional offices of chief financial officer and
state agriculture commissioner than U.S. Senate — an extremely high-profile election in which $181 million was spent. Generally, the higher the elected office, the less likely voters are
to skip it on their ballots. Something sure does seem off in Broward County; we just don’t know what yet.
One possible reason for the discrepancy is poor ballot design. Broward County ballots listed the U.S. Senate race first, right after the ballot instructions. But that pushed the U.S.
Senate race to the far bottom left of the ballot, where voters may have skimmed over it, while the governor’s race appears at the top of the ballot’s center column, immediately to the
right of the instructions.
An alternative explanation is that an error with the vote-tabulating machines in Broward County caused them to sometimes not read people’s votes for U.S. Senate. If that’s true, we
would probably only find out if there is a manual recount. According to Florida law, any election that’s within half a percentage point (as this one currently is) triggers a machine
recount; then, after the machine recount, if the race is within a quarter of a percentage point, it goes to a much more complex manual recount — a.k.a. each ballot is recounted by hand.
As long as the machine recount doesn’t change the Senate results too much (barring a surprise in the remaining ballots in Broward and Palm Beach), it looks like that’s where we’re
headed. In addition, Republican former Rep. Ron DeSantis and Democratic Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum are separated by just 0.44 points in the governor’s race, so that could go
to a machine recount, too.
Florida is the embodiment of Murphy's law lmao
Possibly related to this?
Watch as it turns out both Gillum and Nelson won after all. It's Bush vs Gore all over again, except this time I'm crossing my fingers that it doesn't go to the supreme court and they give the Republicans another bullshit victory.
Since this is going into manual recount poll workers will look at the ballots and they'll determine if a voter "had intent" to vote for a candidate but messed up the ballot for whatever reason. Then they'll make a new
ballot and add it
Can global warming just put Florida underwater already, I'm sure nobody will miss it.
My county (Broward) has had election problems since before 2000.
I guarantee you that if those in charge here weren't incompetent and possibly malicious, Gore would have won in 2000 and many other Republican positions here wouldn't have been made. Snipes, the one currently in charge of this mess, has thrown out tons of democratic ballots over the years.
Though I find it hilarious Trump and Scott are calling her deeds as if she's throwing out Republican ballots, lmao the bare-faced liars
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/broward/article221420190.html
Fueled by Trump tweets and unfounded claims of voter fraud, dozens of protesters gathered outside the Broward County elections headquarters Friday in a rowdy scene that led staff to call police for protection.
A crowd of about 100 activists organized outside the Lauderhill strip mall that houses Brenda Snipes’ elections operations off U.S. 441, railing about illegal votes and stolen elections. They were drawn to Snipes’
office by the claims of politicians and pundits that thousands of fraudulent ballots are being dumped into the vote tallies from Tuesday’s midterm elections in order to steal races from Gov. Rick Scott and former
Congressman Ron DeSantis.
Alarmed by unproven claims that elections supervisors are tainting the electoral process, a hastily organized protest was pulled together on social media. Janet Klomburg, a 56-year-old from Weston, was among
the crowd demanding Snipes’ removal from office. “We want her in handcuffs for her criminal history. We want her whole staff in handcuffs,” Klomburg said. “This race was stolen from us.”
Wearing a Make America Great Again hat and Trump 2020 polo, Klomburg straightened a pile of fake ballot boxes that protesters had arranged nearby. Before noon, the crowd swelled to more than a hundred
protesters chanting “Lock her up,” “Brenda Snipes has got to go,” and “Stop the steal.”
More dangerous rhetoric from the orange.
>Florida sinks into the Atlantic ocean.
>Thousands of new reports of meth-addicted fish attacking swimmers along the east coast.
>The elderly survive somehow
>Miami remains the same
Miami was Atlantis the whole time, except now we know that it was never an underwater paradise to begin with, and that we should have left it undiscovered at the depths of the ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
electric boogalo: this time they aren't wearing suits cause they're a bunch of redhat chuds.
just let me and other fpers get out of state first
thanks
The Republicans are completely fine with a broken system when it benefits them, of course. I mean, the last two Republican presidents both lost the popular vote. At the current rate, without major electoral reform, two-thirds of the Senate will represent barely 1/3rd of the US population.
This would kill postal
Florida serves the valuable purpose of letting Americans experience what non-Americans experience when they visit America.
I don't think the scotus can step in here like they could in Bush V Gore, the governorship is a state race and unless they are arguing some VRA violation, the state has the right to make whatever rules it wants in regards to how votes are counted, much like how Az has some counties that let people correct absentee ballots after the election and some that don't.
I'm curious what can be done to fix this, though. We'd have to divide up the most populated states if we wanted more balanced representation in the Senate. And I'm not sure a single state in the country will ever be willing to go through with that.
It's much easier to add DC and Puerto Rico as states. DC has more population then Wyoming and Vermont but no Senators and one non-voting rep which is a bit of an insult.
Scientists Baffled By Man's Counties Incredible Ability To Fuck Up Every Time
Finally....
This is what everyone who voted for Trump voted for. Straight up third-world-dictator election rigging. It's even worse because it's been the fucking policy in Broward County for the last 20 years.
The more this type of election-rigging gets accepted, the worse this nation will become. We have institutional methods of rigging election already - purging voter rolls, partisan gerrymandering, voter ID, etc. Those are fucked up - but literally hiding and changing votes is absolutely fucking despicable. If the House can kick off an investigation into this, every single individual involved should be jailed for life. We need a conviction with the severity of treason for undermining American democratic processes - jailed, for life, no parole, you're done. Raise the stakes so high that even imagining how to rig an election would ruin your entire life - instead of getting you a job with the state GOP so you can brag on television that you want to suppress votes.
It’s not necessarily a problem that needs to be fixed anyways. The two Senators per state rule certainly wasn’t intended to facilitate proportional representation of the population - that’s what the House is for. And the apportionment algorithm for seats in the House serves quite well in that regard (except for the necessary overrepresentation of Wyoming).
The problem is the founding fathers didn't anticipate (along with so many other things) that we'd get to the point where one out of two viable parties is so completely corrupt that them having any power whatsoever endangers the very foundations of democracy.
Additionally, they figured that if that happened then a militia would rise up, if needed, to literally throw them out of office and immediately re-elect another man to serve in their seat.
Yep. They couldn't have possibly predicted that 250 years from then, the modern day US military would have giant metal birds that could bomb the shit out of a local militia from a great distance.
I'm sure we could band together and fund a GoFundMe to get Postal a set of water wings.
Well, to put it into full context such a militia would've been organized by the State back then -- or by a break-off faction from the state militia. Meaning, more or less, it'd be like seeing all your local military bases organize together with or without the State Governor's approval and set themselves to march to Washington to remove said person from their seat. Of course, back then, news spread slowly and distances were both long to travel and armies weren't precisely trackable -- also you'd have to go through the same conditions as they did to reach them.
Nowadays if such a OPFOR rose up drones would be on their ass the whole way to Washington D.C. and the army would meet them with force before they even hit the State's borders. That sort of organized, military, resistance simply isn't plausible these days with present technology and news presence. The only real way to do it would be an underground guerilla force -- which, again, could be detected and potentially dismantled as they'd have to organize somehow -- and almost all the methods they might do so are actively monitored for exactly that sort of thing.
The Founding Fathers also didn't intend for the nation to have a standing army. That's what the Militia was for.
But again, as you pointed out, they also couldn't have fore-seen that a country on the other side of the globe can rain firey death upon us with the push of a button, and within minutes to a couple of hours. Hardly enough warning time to assemble a militia and counter-attack.
Since it's Florida it's an equal chance 25 thousand Floridians are fucking blind or the tabulating machines are so bad they didn't record votes since they were in a odd place on the ballot.
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