Judge Upholds Florida Election Law, “Nelson Has No Path” to Victory
“It’s done. But it was done before today. This was a total Hail Mary”
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker upheld Florida law that “forbids county election offices from counting vote-by-mail ballots received after 7 p.m. Election Day.”
This was the last best hope for Democrats after suffering several setbacks in recent days, including Florida Governor Rick Scott gaining over 800 votes in the mandatory recount, yet as of this writing Nelson has yet to concede.
Sen. Bill Nelson has run out of time, run out of favorable court rulings and is about to officially run out of votes.
After losing to Gov. Rick Scott on Election Day, losing after an automatic recount and appearing to not make up the gap following a manual recount Friday, Nelson’s campaign was dealt a mortal blow later that evening by U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker, who crushed the Democrat’s last major hope by upholding a Florida law that forbids county election offices from counting vote-by-mail ballots received after 7 p.m. Election Day.
“It’s done. But it was done before today. This was a total Hail Mary,” said a top Democrat involved in Nelson’s campaign who didn’t want to speak publicly before the Democratic Party icon conceded defeat to one of the party’s most-hated rivals.
. . . . While party officials refused to discuss the hopelessness of the situation on the record, the Florida Democratic Party on Friday continued to fundraise off the recount, suggesting to donors that Nelson had a shot when his own top backers knew he didn’t.
. . . . “The votes weren’t there. It was bad ballot design,” said Democratic data analyst Matt Isbell, who first raised the issue of the undervotes after Election Night. “Nelson has no path.”
According to Politico, Nelson on Friday “gave an emotional ‘thank you’ speech to staff earlier in the day ‘but it was more of a goodbye,’ said yet another top Florida Democrat connected to Nelson’s re-election.
Scott’s campaign is calling on Nelson to concede or to withdraw from the race.
“It looks like this is the end of the line for the Nelson campaign. He was really relying on this undercount being due to machine error which, if that were the case, would have revealed more Senate votes,” said Matthew Isbell, a Democratic data consultant from South Florida. “Considering how blue Broward is, it would have netted him thousands of additional votes. Without Broward, there is no obvious way he can make the votes up.”
Mr. Scott’s campaign quickly came to a similar conclusion. “With the hand recount concluding in most counties across the state showing no significant change in the margin, it’s time for Bill Nelson to face reality and concede,” Chris Hartline, a spokesman for the Scott campaign, said in a statement.
Mr. Nelson’s campaign has not commented on the progress of the manual recount. But he was said to be huddling with his advisers, who are becoming increasingly pessimistic, and he could decide to drop out of the race in the next few days, two people close to the campaign told The New York Times.
We’ll update as more information becomes available.
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Comments
Sad that headline evokes surprise. A judge actually upholding the law in Fl. election.
You just know a career Democrat politician will have to be dragged from his office by the ankles, scratching the floor along the way trying to cling to power.
And yet while being dragged, they leave a trail of slime.
This isn’t over until Governor Scott takes the oath of office for US Senator.
Bill Nelson always likes to refer to himself as a ‘space expert’ and an ‘astrounaut’ because he and Jake Garn got a ride on a space shuttle. They were told to float there and do NOT touch anything. I believe Nelson spent most, and even set a record for doing so, of his time throwing up.
Skeletor is certainly Spaced Out! Get him out! What a disgrace.
I believe Nelson spent most, and even set a record for doing so, of his time throwing up.
Word in the industry is that about half the people put into orbit do that. It’s not widely advertised, as it would likely take a bit of the shine off the Space Age. It’s why I don’t take stories touting the imminent development of suborbital ballistic passenger flights seriously—”ballistic” means free fall, and the general public won’t be enthusiastic about vomiting all the way, no matter how quickly they can get to Japan by scramjet.
Nelson will now be one more ‘victim’ thereby deepening the # Resistance. Same for Abrams in Georgia. When Dems regain power, which I believe will happen in 2020, they will once and for all make sure none of these ‘outrages’ against them will ever happen again. For Dems, political power is a necessity like oxygen and blood flow.
Well done, congratulations Sen-elect Scott. I’d be happier about this if it weren’t yet another reminder that the xerox machine and the judiciary have replaced the ballot box.
I guarantee the leftists will say this was selection not election, just as they did with Bush and Gore, despite the fact that every later recount showed Bush won.
The left tried to steal this Florida election. I sincerely hope those who did all they could to do so get prosecuted to the fullest extent possible, but I doubt the Republicans will do that.
“The votes weren’t there. It was bad ballot design”.
Shades of 2000 when Gore blamed the infamous butterfly ballot (designed by the Dem Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections) for his loss. Remember that they claimed voters were confused and voted for Buchanan instead of Gore because of the complex ballot, then they segued into the whole chad analysis.
Well if it was indeed poor ballot design then the Dems only have themselves and their minions to blame, since Dems designed the ballots in those 2 major counties.
Who cares? They’ll do that until the end of time. We just have to BEAT them. Who cares if they’re happy about it?
If nothing else, Florida needs to eliminate the panel of “experts” created to determine voter intent on “undercount” ballots. Everything is set-up to provide opportunities for fraud and screw ups.
Better yet, make public certified voter rolls purged of ineligible voters who died or moved or are non-citizens, or choose not to be registered, two weeks or more before the election. Eliminate mail-in ballots. Re-establish paper ballots only and voting only on election day at designated polling places.
What exactly is the purpose of the Federal Election Commission anyway? If they can’t do their jobs, maybe they too should be eliminated.
There you go, suppressin’ the vote. /s
P.Phil – in WA, they mail ballots to registered voters. After filling them out, a serialized tear-off stub is removed which renders the ballot indistinguishable from any other ballot. It’s stuffed in a privacy folder and inserted in the return envelope, then signed. Once received by the county elections office, the signature on the envelope is verified and vote removed and added to the pile.
What stops anyone from producing stacks of de-stubbed ballots and slip-streaming them into the counting process? The only time that’s exposed is when precincts tally more votes than they have registered voters. And then all it invokes is a raised-eyebrow.
In my minds-eye, ballot-boxes and ballots need Brinks-like armored car security throughout the process to prevent the slip-streaming – so long as VOTER ID / serialization is separated from the ballot before counting.
“serialized tear-off stub”? In Seattle? Not where I’m at on the East side.
Mike – I’m in Clallam Co. Mailed out ballots for my wife and I had consecutive numbers of the sort “Count: 1929” and “Count: 1930”. Instructions on the page-wide 1/2″ tall stub are “Voter please remove and discard stub”.
The other numbers on the stub would appear to be the file number of the master ballot and the precinct number. It also has one of those odd-ball black dot boxes for scan ID. (Have I just dated myself?!?)
Once removed, there’s no ID on the ballot to trace it back to the voter.
MrE, OK I’m in Spokane County and didn’t have any noticeable numbers on the ballot. Definitely no tear-offs.
I agree. We always hear about “voter suppression” or “voter disenfranchisement”, but we never hear the phrase “voter responsibility”. It is not anyone’s responsibility to ensure that my vote arrives on time and in a fashion that makes sure it will count, period.
My counter to that would be: if the system was so bad, why did Nelson put so much effort into suing to have the standards used by the board overturned? If the standards had been overturned, and officials would have been free to assume every voter voting for Democrats for governor or congressperson meant the voter must have meant to vote for Nelson too, then thousands of votes might well have been generated. And yet, because those standards were not overturned, Nelson got basically nothing.
So, are the standards really the problem? Or is the notion standards can be willy-nilly altered after Election Day to provide “relief” to the losing candidate the problem?
Bill Nelson’s lack of accomplishment as a Senator is exceeded only be his gracelessness in defeat. Utterly without dignity.
Isbell was correct that Broward would have generated thousands of extra votes for the Dems. He failed to note those would be manufactured or conjured out of thin air. There is a new “Lost Cause” in the South. The old “Confederacy” can’t win for the Democrats like in the Jim Crow days.
It seems that Brenda Snipes and Susan Bucher were too incompetent to steal an election properly. Maybe they need to visit Chicago and get trained.
The fact that there were thousands of overvotes in four counties, all Democratic strongholds, favoring a straight Democratic ticked 2-1, means a third level of fraud was discovered by the machine count. Overvotes occur when the vote machine records votes for which the physical ballot does not exist. It is created by running a single ballot through many times. I suggest each of these counties had a voting machine in the backroom for a couple hours.
This reminds one of the odd incident in the Florida 2000 election when a Democratic Party official was stopped for a routine traffic ticket when the police officer found and confiscated a vote counting machine in the front seat of his car.
Given the illegals voting as alleged, the evidence for manufactured votes via the absentee and provisional ballots, the coordination between these Democratic counties, I speculate that there may be hundreds of thousands of illegal votes. And the only reason this operation was shut down, was so it could go in operation in 2020.
Yes, it was a Hail Mary.
WHY do teams throw Hail Marys? Because they’re already losing and there is no consequence for doing it.
Why do Democrats always try to cheat? Because they’re already losing and there is no consequence for doing it.
Visit REAL CONSEQUENCES on the people doing this or they’ll do it again in 2020.
“Florida Democratic Party on Friday continued to fundraise off the recount”
The Dim party is all about making people rich off of fund raising. Nelson gets to keep how much?
Isn’t it a sad thing when it is big news, front page news in fact, when any judge actually upholds election law? Because in almost every case judges consider election law to be advisory only, if that.