A Trump election conspiracy collapses

MIAMI — A Trump election conspiracy theory has fallen apart after Florida’s law enforcement agency said it had found no widespread voter fraud in the 2018 races for Senate and governor.

President Donald Trump had complained repeatedly about election “fraud” and theft in heavily populated, Democrat-rich Broward and Palm Beach counties, which had slowly but erratically updated their vote totals after polls closed on Election Day.

With each updated tally, Republican candidates Rick Scott, who was running for U.S. Senate, and Ron DeSantis, in a bid for the governor’s mansion, saw their margins of victory narrow. Both races ultimately went to recounts.

It’s common for election margins to change as more ballots are counted, but Scott, who was governor at the time, claimed without evidence that the counts reeked of Democratic fraud, a conspiracy theory Trump amplified on Twitter. Scott called for an investigation. Trump backed him up.

“Law Enforcement is looking into another big corruption scandal having to do with Election Fraud in #Broward and Palm Beach. Florida voted for Rick Scott!” wrote Trump on Nov. 8, 2018.

In a tweet the next day, the president falsely accused Democrats of sending “their best Election stealing lawyer, Marc Elias, to Broward County they miraculously started finding Democrat votes. Don’t worry, Florida - I am sending much better lawyers to expose the FRAUD!”

But neither Trump’s unnamed “lawyers” nor the Florida Department of Law Enforcement found evidence of a “big corruption scandal.” The state took more than 17 months to wrap up its investigation Wednesday, and found none of the wrongdoing alleged by Trump and Scott.

At the time, Trump’s interest in the races for Senate and governor went beyond the usual partisan support for Republican candidates. Scott and DeSantis are among the president’s two closest allies, and Florida could decide his political future as he runs for reelection.

Trump’s corruption conspiracy in Florida collapsed as he sought to discredit vote-by-mail efforts in two other battleground states, Michigan and Nevada, with incendiary and false rhetoric. As Trump tweeted falsities about vote-by-mail in those states, the Florida GOP sent a fundraising email urging donors to “Stop Voter Fraud.”

The president’s attacks on mail-in voting have increased in recent months as demand for mail-in ballots has increased during the coronavirus outbreak. Polls consistently show Trump marginally trailing Joe Biden ahead of the November election.

In the 2016 Republican primary in Florida, Trump baselessly complained of “dishonest” voting and falsely accused his opponent, Sen. Marco Rubio, of working with the Republican Party chairman “& their minions … to rig the vote.” Trump stopped complaining after he won the primary.

But he stepped up his complaints again before the general election with conspiracy theories about rigged voting that Republicans as far west as Idaho and Washington condemned as false. After Trump won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote, he claimed that California had illegal voters in 2016.

After the nonprofit, nonpartisan fact-checking organization PolitiFact labeled that claim a “ pants-on-fire ” lie, Trump repeated it at a White House press briefing in April.

Election officials and experts expect high voter turnout in November and an increased number of people casting ballots by mail, many for the first time in states that have little experience managing mail-in programs or high volumes of mailed ballots. That’s a recipe for longer and slower vote counting and, if the election is close in battlegrounds like Florida, more potential for fraud claims as vote totals change after the polls close, especially in urban southeast Florida.

“Late-arriving ballots tend to break toward Democrats,” said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political science professor who specializes in voting by mail.

“It’s not an iron-clad law, but the phenomenon is so prevalent it has a name: the blue shift,” said McDonald. “It happened in California as well in 2018. But perception has built that there’s something nefarious going on here with these ballots being counted late, or after Election Day, but I don’t want to imply there’s anything or illegal or wrong going on.”

In Florida’s 2018 election, bad management — particularly in the long-troubled office of former Broward County Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes — made the vote tallies look suspicious.

Rather than continually update the election system on election night with a running tally of ballots counted, Broward officials uploaded tens of thousands of ballots at irregular times late at night. Because of the county’s sheer size and liberal-leaning electorate, the new ballots caused statewide margins to shift suddenly in Democrats’ favor.

As Republican margins shrank, Trump stepped up his misleading attacks on “ the Broward Effect ” of “found” votes and, later, “ missing or forged ” ballots. In all, he tweeted Florida election conspiracy theories and complaints 10 times over the course of a week.

Two days after the election, Scott was perilously close to losing his Senate bid to unseat incumbent Bill Nelson. He held a rare press conference at the governor’s mansion to demand an investigation and said he was suing Palm Beach and Broward counties.

“Every Floridian should be concerned there may be rampant voter fraud in Palm Beach and Broward counties,” Scott said, providing no evidence. “I will not sit idly by while unethical liberals try to steal this election from the great people of Florida.”

Florida law enforcement officials initially balked, seeing no signs of the fraud Scott described. But Scott and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded the investigation. Bondi would later represent Trump during his impeachment.

DeSantis kept quiet and ultimately won the governor’s mansion by less than half a percentage point after a recount. Scott prevailed by less than a quarter point.

Florida investigators also looked into three unrelated election matters from 2018. They found no proof that Republicans were illegally blocked from witnessing the recount in Broward. And they concluded there was no evidence that Democrats committed fraud when they tried to help voters fix problematic absentee ballots.

Investigators did find, however, that a Panhandle election supervisor in a Republican-heavy county reeling from Hurricane Michael might have broken the law by allowing a dozen votes to be emailed in and counted. State prosecutors said there was too little evidence to bring a case.

A White House spokesperson for Trump referred questions about the Florida findings to the president’s campaign. A spokesperson for the campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Scott spokesperson Chris Hartline said the senator and his staff “appreciate the hard work” of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

“Senator Scott’s goal has always been 100% participation and 0% fraud,” wrote Hartline in an email. “During the 2018 recount, certain Supervisors of Elections were openly disregarding state laws that were meant to prevent fraud, as confirmed by multiple court decisions.”

While the Florida Department of Law Enforcement found no fraud, the new supervisor of elections in Broward County, Pete Antonacci, did.

Reviewing the 2018 election, Antonacci, a Republican, found 21 cases of people who illegally voted twice and one instance of a noncitizen who voted unlawfully. Out of more 709,180 ballots cast in the county, those cases brought the potential fraud rate to 0.003 percent.

Antonacci forwarded the cases last year to the office of Broward State Attorney Mike Satz. A spokesperson for the office was unable to provide a status of the cases to POLITICO.

Antonacci “does not believe there is widespread voter fraud,” said spokesperson Steve Vancore.

And absentee ballot requests in Broward are quadrupling amid the coronavirus pandemic even as Republicans, who once embraced mail-in voting, increasingly complain of fraud, he said.

Charles Franklin, a political scientist and pollster with Marquette University in Wisconsin, said Trump has added voting by mail to the list of GOP concerns about election security, noting there’s “a touch of irony after North Carolina,” where a Republican operative faces criminal charges for absentee ballot tampering in a congressional race, a rare case in which mail-in voting fraud appeared to tip a major election.

Miami, which has had a history of shady elections, had a high-profile absentee ballot fraud case in 1997 that overturned a mayoral race involving Republicans. The following year, Florida Republicans narrowly won a U.S. Senate seat thanks to absentee ballots.

And even as he complained about mail-in voting, Trump himself cast an absentee ballot in the presidential primary earlier this year in Florida, where he recently declared his residence.

He has continued to attack mail-in voting and raised the specter of election fraud, even as it blew back on a newly hired campaign aide.

Republican concerns with election security increased markedly after the 2000 Florida presidential recount. But Republicans became more likely to talk about election fraud, Franklin said, after mail-in ballots flipped Washington’s governor’s race for Democrats in 2004 and Minnesota’s Senate race flipped for Democrats in 2008 after a recount.

Franklin said he understands why people would be suspicious of election results that flipped after recounts, but the reaction to Florida’s 2018 election made little sense.

“Now what happened in Florida, oh my goodness!” he said with a hint of wholesome Midwestern surprise. “That happens in every election. Late counts can come from a heavily Democratic area of the state — or a Republican area, whatever delays the count — and it changes the results statewide.”

Gary Fineout contributed to this report.