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I stopped reading here because I had to look this up.
This is not "there are 4000 voters in this county, but 4100 ballots were cast."
This is "212 people were logged as submitting a vote at this voting center, but 213 ballots were in the machines."
So someone goofed up, or someone stuffed a ballot. This is distributed across 293 precincts, with a total of 885 extra ballots.
It sounds like Florida fixed the problems. Which is what is supposed to happen when an auditor shows problems! That is not "strange" at all!
The systems to keep the books aligned have gotten much better. The election I observed in Florida (very boring!) had numbers on each ballot so if one just "showed up" it would be recognized. Was it someone playing games or was it normal human error? Good question. The new system stops both accidentals and purposeful unaccounted ballots, so either way I am happy it is in place.
This is important to remember.
Uh, specifically Desantis fixed the problems. He probably would have done more investigation into what actually happened but he didn't take office until months after the fact.
Which is why the current measures shouldn't be surprising in the least. Because if an election does get compromised sufficiently, it is extremely hard to fix things after the fact.
Which Florida knows full well from the 2000 election.
Desantis has taken a series of seemingly low-cost steps to prevent some potentially VERY high cost issues from arising.
...and that is precisely why I suspect the word has gone out on whatever the current iteration of Journo-list is that DeSantis must be undermined at every opportunity. He is the potential nightmare scenario what many were warning about back in 2017, a "Trump" without Trump's baggage.
Its weird because while the Dems seem to correctly identify that Desantis is their single largest threat in 2024, they also seem to focus on his popularity and Trump-like qualities as the biggest danger.
They seem HORRIBLE at actually modelling him as a threat. Because if they could, they'd realize that what makes him really dangerous to them is the fact that he doesn't just do things for their object-level effects. He wants to win on the meta level, and isn't just focused on pumping his personal image or winning the next election. He is explicitly NOT Trump-like in this specific way, which is to say he won't make the same mistakes as Trump.
The lack of apparent baggage, of course, means their normal tactics are likely to fail, too. Ironically, their biggest hope is that a Desantis- Trump battle fractures the GOP and prevents either from getting the nom.
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My impression is that Desantis first needed to be undermined because he bucked the narrative on Covid policy. No mask mandates, no vax mandates, he didn't close schools and businesses. Maybe it's just b/c I'm in public health, but I first remember hearing about Desantis when the consensus was that Florida MUST be cooking the books on their Covid numbers because his reckless leadership was obviously killing Grandma. And if the data disagree, the data must be lies..
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surely desantis is being 'undermined' because democrats dislike republicans, as usual, similar to how republicans 'undermine' biden, not specifically because of voter fraud?
Any evidence here? Did the past journo-list leaks have any instances of "this guy is cracking down on voter fraud! better get him, we depend on illegal voters!" or even something vaguely similar to that?
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