The Florida 2018 elections for U.S. Senator and Governor Are Highly Suspicious [View all]
Shortly prior to the 2018 midterms I contacted the Orange County, Florida (where I live) supervisor of elections to ask them how they intended to ensure that our votes are counted accurately. The answer was that audits would be conducted on statistically valid samples of ballots, and that this would be followed up by hand recounts where audits provided a red flag for serious errors. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that because of our country’s history of woefully inadequate election security and integrity in the 21st Century.
Following the election and the calling of the governor and Senator elections in Florida, I again contacted the Orange County supervisor of elections to follow up on their audit plans. I was told that there would be no audit because the machine recounts (for both elections) and hand recount (for the Senator election) made audits unnecessary. I tried to explain why the partial recounts that were done in no way made audits or follow-up full hand recounts unnecessary – but to no avail.
The partial hand recount of the Florida Senate election strongly suggests fraud (see below). The 2018 machine and partial hand recounts of the governor and U.S. Senate races in Florida were woefully inadequate as a means of ruling out fraud because: The machine recounts are inadequate for that purpose simply because if they had been programmed for fraud prior to the election there would be no good reason to believe that recounting of the votes by the same machines would produce a significantly different result than the original count.
The hand recount included only under- and over-votes, which amounted to about 32,000 ballots, less than 0.4% of the full Florida vote count. I’ve read two somewhat conflicting accounts of the results, but they both indicate substantial narrowing of Rick Scott’s lead over bill Nelson. According to CNN, Scott’s lead of 12,603 votes decreased by more than 2,500 votes following the hand recount. According to the Miami Herald, only 410 additional valid votes for Nelson and 136 valid votes for Scott were found from the recount (2). Although these accounts appear to contradict each other, there are two very important points that need to be emphasized about either scenario: 1) Nelson’s gains on the hand recount in either case are far too great to be attributed to random statistical error (I used statistics on a daily basis for 40 years in my career as an epidemiologist). The odds against such gains occurring by random chance are astronomical – exceeding odds of millions to one; and, 2) Given that the hand recount involved less than 0.4% of Florida’s ballots, if similar differences were found in the rest of the state in a follow-up recount, Nelson’s gains would exceed his current deficit by tens of thousands of votes, even using the lower vote count difference noted above.
I am not implying that the above proves election fraud – though it is certainly very suggestive of that. But certainly any election system geared towards ensuring the accuracy of the vote count would mandate a state-wide hand recount of the Senate race under these circumstances (and the governor’s race if the Senate recount changed the results of the election).
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