Count every vote. U.S. Senate, Governor and Commissioner of Agriculture races, one State Senate race and two State House of Representatives seats are too close to call. Our St. Johns County Canvassing Board consists of Judge Charles Tinlin, Supervisor of Elections Vicki Oakes and former City Attorney Ronald Wayne Brown. We look to them to assure the integrity of the recount process here in St. Johns County, Florida.
While few recounts change the outcome, some do. Here's a 2016 article, which limns several famous example.
I was an impressionable Georgetown University freshman and EMK Senate intern observing the 1974-75 Wymn v. Durkin process, described in the Post article and others below. The contested New Hampshire Senate election resulted in a deadlock new special election and the election of Democratic Senator John Durkin in a landslide. Both candidates in the close election, Republican U.S. Rep. Louis Wyman and Democratic State Insurance Commissioner John Durkin, were provided with provisional office space and treated with respect by Senators.
Why?
The United States Senate is the "world's greatest deliberative body," as Gladstone said.
We must not guess people into the United States Senate. The Seventeenth Amendment gives election of Senators to the people of each state -- not political apparatchicks.
Thus, we reject as trash-talking certain chauvinistic utterances from mouthpieces for Florida Governor RICHARD LYNN SCOTT (who appointed the Secretary of State in charge of elections and recounts).
"RED-TIDE RICK" SCOTT's proclaiming "victory" in a close election where mailed and provisional ballots have NOT even been counted yet? Sounds authoritarian, hierarchical and infantile, at best.
Meanwhile, devious Georgia Secretary of State BRIAN KEMP, the Secretary of State, is overseeing the election in which he is running for Governor. That's a conflict of interest, being heard by a federal court today. BRIAN KEMP violently purged the election rolls in a discriminatory manner, and should be held accountable for civil rights violations.
SCOTT, KEMP and their TRUMP-besotted casuistries do not deter us.
Count every vote.
From the Washington Post:
Recounts almost never work. Except these three.
Among the thousands of recounts that have been undertaken in modern U.S. elections, there are just a handful of high-profile ones that have turned a loser into a winner.
No presidential race has ever been overturned by a recount, one of several reasons the Green Party-led/Hillary Clinton-backed recount in Wisconsin is such a long shot. “It's very, very rare for recounts to succeed at the federal level, or in statewide races,” said Robert David Johnson, a history professor with Brooklyn College.
The recounts that did work were in races with very small margins. Here are the three most famous.
1. The 2008 Minnesota Senate race
U.S. Democratic senatorial candidate Al Franken and Republican Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) (Eric Miller/Reuters)
The stakes: Minnesota's razor-thin 2008 U.S. Senate race, which was the tipping point for Democrats' filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate.
Initial result: On election night, Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) was ahead of challenger Al Franken (D) by just 206 votes out of more than 2.9 million cast, a slim enough margin to automatically trigger a recount.
Recount process: A months-long recount of all the state's votes put Franken ahead of Coleman by 312 votes. Franken declared victory and started hiring Senate staff. But Coleman challenged the recount's results in court, a challenge that went on for another six months and all the way to the state Supreme Court.
Finally, in June, the state Supreme Court upheld the original recount and declared Franken the winner. “The Supreme Court has spoken. I will respect its decision, and abide by its results,” Coleman said. Franken officially took the Senate seat seven months after the election.
2. The 2004 Washington state governor's race
The stakes: An open governor's mansion in Washington in 2004 and one of the closest governor's races in history.
The initial results: On election night, results showed Republican former state senator Dino Rossi leading Democratic Attorney General Christine Gregoire by 261 votes out of some 3 million ballots cast.
The recount: There were several different recounts, which found several different results. (“This election is a really good example of why different types of recount can matter,” Johnson said.)
First, a legally required electronic re-scan of ballots reduced Rossi's lead to just 42 votes.
Then the state Democratic Party requested a hand recount (Washington's first), which gave Gregoire a 10-vote lead. The hand recount uncovered hundreds of missing ballots, and the Democratic Party had to go to the state Supreme Court to get those votes counted, which gave Gregoire a 129-vote lead.
Gregoire declared victory. But instead of conceding, Republicans sued, with Rossi insinuating this wasn't “a clean election.” Millions of dollars and months later, yet another recount boosted Gregoire's lead by four votes. This time, Rossi dropped his challenge.
“This is the biggest display of democracy I have ever seen,” Gregoire said amid the recount.
3. The 1974 New Hampshire Senate race
The stakes: An open Senate seat in a swing state (New Hampshire, 1974) and what ended up being the longest contested election in U.S. Senate history, plus a unique appeal to the Senate itself to try to solve the race.
The initial results: On election night, GOP Rep. Lewis Wyman was leading Democrat John Durkin by 355 votes. Durkin and Democrats immediately demanded a recount.
The recount: It became a nearly year-long headache. The first recount declared Durkin the winner by 10 votes. This time it was Wyman's turn to demand a recount. (Sensing a trend here?) This next recount had Wyman ahead by two votes.
By this time, the outgoing GOP senator had resigned his seat, and the governor, also a Republican, appointed Wyman to fill his spot.
Durkin's last-ditch effort was to file a request to the U.S. Senate to have the chamber determine the results. His logic was that Congress is the final arbiter of its own elections — and how convenient for him, the Senate was Democratic-controlled.
This was the first (and so far only) time a Senate election was thrown to the Senate. And we can see why it hasn't happened since: The Senate spent some six months reviewing thousands of ballots and debating what to do. No surprise here: They couldn't decide on anything.
Eventually Durkin and Wyman ended up deciding that the race was just too close to call and agreeing to just start over and hold a new election(!). The special election was held in September, and Durkin beat Wyman by 27,000 votes.
But Durkin never was able to overcome the taint of that nasty election and was easily beaten in the next one. In 2008, he told the Associated Press he wouldn't have wished the experience on his worst enemy.
