During Friday’s Morning Joe, the panel repeatedly mocked the concern of Florida Senate candidate and current Governor Rick Scott, Senator Marco Rubio, and President Trump about Scott’s shrinking lead in the Florida Senate race as a result of votes coming in from Broward County well after Election Day.
The panel neglected to mention that Florida law mandates that the results of mail ballots be announced thirty minutes after the polls closed; the heavily Democratic Broward County, which has a long history of mismanaging elections, failed to comply with the law.
Co-host Joe Scarborough showed his jealousy of Florida politicians who have had more success than he did, whining that “Marco Rubio wants to make sure that Florida citizens’ votes aren’t counted” before dismissing the concerns of Rubio, Scott, and President Trump as “third-world country stuff.”
A little history would make it perfectly clear that the concerns of Republicans are not “third-world country stuff.” As Newsbusters has reported, Rubio, Scott, and the President have plenty of reason for concern based on what happened in the 2008 Minnesota Senate election and the 2004 Washington Gubernatorial election; where “legal street fights” overturned Republican election night victories.
Not surprisingly, the media have chosen to largely ignore this history as well as the shady behavior of Broward County and its heavily Democratic neighbor to the north, Palm Beach County. Both counties are “violating Florida law by refusing to provide required information to the public, and…illegally refusing to allow officials into the ballot counting area to observe what is occurring,” as Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist explained. According to Hemingway, the media would point this out if they were “something other than the communications leaders of the progressive movement.”
Later, the conversation turned to the Georgia gubernatorial race, where Scarborough claimed: “If the Georgia election were held in the country of Georgia instead of the state of Georgia, the United States State Department would be protesting what...Brian Kemp is doing it in the light of day.”
He slammed Kemp, the Republican nominee for Governor and current Secretary of State who the media has relentlessly accused of engineering mass voter suppression, accusing him of keeping himself in charge of the election "like some third-world dictator.”
The entire panel repeatedly trashed the Republican Party throughout the segment, concluding with Never-Trumper Susan Del Percio later remarked that the Republican Party now has the reputation of “trying to suppress votes and scare people,” in addition to claiming that “no one wants to join us.”
Since this segment, the Florida Secretary of State has ordered a recount for the extremely close Senate and gubernatorial races. The announcement of the recount came after judges in Broward and Palm Beach Counties ordered election officials to release more information regarding the number of outstanding ballots.
A transcript of the relevant portion of Friday’s Morning Joe is below. Click “expand” to read more.
Morning Joe
11/09/18
06:13 AM
WILLIE GEIST: As we mentioned in Florida, the state that brought the 2000 Presidential Election to a crawl, the races for Senate and Governor both now appear to be headed for recounts. Returns coming in from Broward County have pushed Democrats Andrew Gillum and Senator Bill Nelson closer to their Republican opponents, Ron DeSantis and Governor Rick Scott. In the race for Senate, just over 15,000 votes now separate Rick Scott and Bill Nelson. The difference is less than a quarter of a point. Under Florida law, a margin smaller than half a point triggers a machine recount and if the margin falls below a quarter of a point, a more thorough manual recount takes place. An attorney for Senator Nelson predicted he eventually would win, telling the Orlando Sentinel, “we believe at the end of the day, Senator Nelson is going to be declared the winner and return to the U.S. Senate.” In Broward County, more than 24,000 people voted for a gubernatorial candidate but did not vote for a Senate candidate, a common theory is that some voters missed the contest because of how the ballot was designed. The Senate race was at the bottom left corner, away from the races that got more votes. But with his lead appearing to shrink, Governor Rick Scott has now filed a lawsuit against both that Broward County Supervisor of Elections and the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections, demanding access to ballots there. He’s accusing election officials in both counties of “rampant fraud” and has ordered Florida’s department of law enforcement to investigate.
RICK SCOTT: We’ve all seen the incompetence and irregularities in vote tabulations in Broward and Palm Beach for years. Well, here we go again. I will not sit idly by while unethical liberals try to steal this election from the great people of Florida. Every day since the election, the left wing activists in Broward County have been coming up with more and more ballots out of nowhere. We all know what is going on. Every person in Florida knows exactly what is happening. Their goal is to keep mysteriously finding more votes until the election turns out the way they want.
GEIST: That is the governor of the state. Last night, President Trump weighed in on Twitter writing “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!” Meanwhile, Florida Senator Marco Rubio also weighed in on Twitter, writing part “democrat lawyers are descending on #Florida. They have been very clear they aren’t here to make sure every vote is counted. They are here to change the results of the election; & #Broward is where they plan to do it.” And President Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani pointing the blame at…Hillary Clinton.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Oh, my God.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Come on.
GEIST: Rudy wrote this. “Hillary’s lawyers trying to steal Florida election. They are still counting (or creating) ballots just in Democratic Broward and Palm Beach.”
SCARBOROUGH: Seriously, can you believe where this guy has gone?
GEIST: Where has he been, by the way?
SCARBOROUGH: And where is he now? Can you believe how much he has tarnished his reputation? America’s mayor, the guy that guided this city after 9/11. He’s just humiliating himself every day and everything he says ends up being false. He gets booed at Yankee stadium. I didn’t know that’s how he wanted to end his life as a public figure. So Susan, you actually have Republicans, Marco Rubio, in the fevered swamp of conspiracy theories. You talk about Trumpism, actually saying…and Rick Scott and Donald Trump, they’re all arm and arm, shoulder to shoulder saying that it’s a conspiracy for every vote to be counted. Again, I will state, The Bush recount, at least what we were doing in northwest Florida, we were fighting like hell to make sure every military vote got counted. That’s what we were trying to do. And it was the Democratic lawyers back then that were trying to stop that. I know. I was there for 38 long days. And we made sure every vote was counted. 18 years later, Marco Rubio actually wants to make sure that Florida citizens’ votes aren’t counted. Rick Scott’s freaking out. He doesn’t want ballots to be counted. Donald Trump…this is third…
BRZEZINSKI: Can he be a little less obvious?
SCARBOROUGH: This is third-world country stuff coming from the Republican Party who I would think if they wanted to be consistent with 2000 would be fighting to get every vote counted.
SUSAN DEL PERCIO: They would. And for 30 years, I’ve been working with Republicans. And always, when they’re behind and it’s this close, they’re always fighting for that recount. So this is…it’s just ludicrous that they would change it. But what’s also, when you look back to Donald Trump in 2016 is that he has been questioning the integrity of our elections. And that’s what scares me is that these comments that they’re making have been brought out by the President over time. And now he’s calling on law enforcement to make sure that this conspiracy theory doesn’t exist when it’s the same law enforcement that he didn’t believe when they said the Russians were involved in our election. So he really just tries to muddle the waters and it’s very scary for a democracy.
SCARBOROUGH: Well, you know, they got nothing. Sometimes close elections take, Eugene, three or four days, five days, it’s happening in Arizona.
EUGENE SCOTT: Right.
SCARBOROUGH: And it’s happening in Florida and they’re just angry because the votes are coming from Maricopa County…
SCOTT: Right.
SCARBOROUGH: …and Broward county. It’s that simple. They are trying to stop the votes from being counted. I’ll say it. They’re trying to stop my vote from being counted. I cast an absentee ballot. They don’t want that to be counted. Or people like me who handed in an absentee ballot at the last minute. I mean, that’s Marco Rubio’s idea of democracy?
SCOTT: Yeah, you were just talking about integrity of elections. I used to cover politics in Maricopa County and have spent this week talking to voters in Atlanta and in Miami and they have questions and concerns about the integrity of all of these elections. One thing a lot of people aren’t talking about is voter suppression and the efforts to keep certain votes from being counted, keep certain people from casting their ballot. The long lines, three-hour waits in Florida. People were turned away. Some people believe that their ballots were changed or things weren’t clear. You talk about the ballots being on different pages and people just did not know what was going on.
SCARBOROUGH: Eugene, what about Georgia, where if the Georgia election were held in the country of Georgia instead of the state of Georgia, the United States State Department would be protesting what…Brian Kemp was doing in the light of day. Before the election, we were hearing about Gwinnett County, an incredibly important county, not just for the Governor’s race because it’s the suburbs of Atlanta but also for Handel’s race. What do we see? Huh, the machines break down in Gwinnett County. People have to wait three, four hours in Gwinnett County.
BRZEZINSKI: This is outrageous that it’s still this hard.
SCARBOROUGH: And Kemp, he keeps himself in charge like some, again, like some third-world dictator. I’m running my own elections.
SCOTT: And he was doing it with the support of Donald Trump. And this is why his approval ratings are so low with black voters, are so low with Latino voters, are so low with millennial voters, are so low with women voters, people who would have voted against him. And his…he wants trust, he wants confidence. He asked on Twitter why don’t these communities trust me? It’s this type of thing. When people who have fought for the opportunity to participate in an election feel like they can’t trust the results and they can’t count on their government leaders to back them up, this is why you get this type of reaction.
DEL PERCIO: And this is why the Republican Party is going completely down the drain in a lot of ways because we’re not expanding our base because no one wants to join us, as you’ve mentioned earlier, Joe. And now we have the reputation of trying to suppress votes and not count…
BRZEZINSKI: Scare people.
DEL PERCIO: And scare people. This is just really bad form.
SCARBOROUGH: Wait, wait, wait, ipsy dipsy doo. One, the dipsy is suppress the vote. The doodle, the dipsy doodle, the doodle is don’t count the votes that manage to get in there.
DEL PERCIO: And that’s just not good for a two-party system.
BRZEZINSKI: Sold to you by Donald Trump. This is what he does.
SCARBOROUGH: You know, Mika, again, I’ll say it again. 18 years ago, 18 years ago, especially in northwest Florida, we held a huge rally at the Escambia County Courthouse. We marched about 3,000 people into county commissioners where only about a hundred people were supposed to fit and we all stared at the county commissioners while they were deciding whether they were going to count the ballots of the men and women who served in the armed forces overseas and we had one simple principle, count every vote. That’s where the Republican Party stood 18 years ago. Now, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump and Rick Scott, where do they stand? You know what?
BRZEZINSKI: On the side of winning, no matter what.
SCARBOROUGH: Only count our votes, don’t count the votes. Marco Rubio is what disappointments me the most that he’s concocting a conspiracy theory. For what? For what? Why? Why does he want to damage his reputation for the benefit of Donald Trump?
