Free Republic

Three statewide races in Florida are heading for recounts after a key deadline for county election officials to submit unofficial vote tallies came and went Saturday. The first round of machine recounts, which must be completed by Thursday, sets up a bitter fight to the finish in Florida’s races for Senate, governor and agriculture commissioner. The most closely watched recount is the Senate race between incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who currently carries a narrow lead of roughly 12,500 votes — about 0.15 points. In Florida, an automatic machine recount is triggered if two...

Broward’s elections supervisor accidentally mixed more than a dozen rejected ballots with nearly 200 valid ones, a circumstance that is unlikely to help Brenda Snipes push back against Republican allegations of incompetence. The mistake — for which no one had a solution Friday night — was discovered after Snipes agreed to present 205 provisional ballots to the Broward County canvassing board for inspection. She had initially intended to handle the ballots administratively, but agreed to present them to the canvassing board after Republican attorneys objected.

Rep. Matt Gaetz has video of police removing him from an area where boxes were being secretly loaded onto trucks outside of the election supervisor’s office in Broward County. And in Palm Beach County, the elections supervisor banned journalists were threatened with arrest for filming the public ballot counting.

Dozens of boxes filled with mail-in ballots are sitting inside a Miami-area mail distribution center, according to photos obtained by The Miami New Times. The news outlet noted that the distribution center where the ballots are located is the same one that was evacuated in October after a mail bomb reached the facility. The news about the ballots comes the same day Miami-Dade County announced it finished counting votes for the midterm elections, which includes hotly-contested Senate and gubernatorial races that have yet to be called. Two unnamed sources alleged to The New Times that hundreds or thousands of ballots...

Nine individuals were arrested Thursday for their alleged roles in a 2017 voter fraud scheme involving the municipal election in a Texas border town. These arrests were part of an ongoing investigation into a coordinated effort by political workers to recruit people who would fraudulently claim residential addresses so they could vote in specific races and influence the results of the Edinburg city election held last year, according to information provided by the Office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. “Illegal voting, particularly an organized illegal voting scheme orchestrated by political operatives, is an affront to democracy and results in...

After heavy spending by both sides of the issue, gun control proponents picked up seats in House midterm races as gun rights advocates lost ground. Based on House voting records tracked by the National Rifle Association, more than two dozen gun rights proponents won't be returning to Congress. Meanwhile, House Democrats expanded the number of gun control advocates in their caucus. The new majority includes dozens of candidates who support gun control, including Lucy McBath in Georgia, whose 17-year-old son was fatally shot in 2012 and who made gun violence the centerpiece of her campaign. Sixty-one percent of voters who...

I blame McCain. It was Senator McCain who, out of spite, voted thumbs-down on repealing ObamaCare….

For months we’ve heard from sundry media apocalypticians that this year’s midterms were the last exit off the road to autocracy. On Tuesday, the American people delivered a less dramatic verdict about the significance of the occasion. In a word: meh. Are you interested in seeing Donald Trump voted out of office in two years? I hope so — which is why you should think hard about that “meh.” This week’s elections were, at most, a very modest rebuke of a president reviled by many of his opponents, this columnist included, as an unprecedented danger to the health of liberal...

The races for Senate and governor in Florida tightened even further on Thursday, raising the prospect that two of the highest profile contests in the country could be headed to a recount. The tumult also underscored how intensely divided the country’s largest and most volatile battleground state remains along political and demographic lines 18 years after handing George W. Bush the presidency following one of the most controversial recounts in U.S. history. As of Thursday afternoon, just 17,344 votes – a difference of 0.22 percentage points – separated Sen. Bill Nelson (D) and his Republican challenger, Florida Gov. Rick Scott,...

In Tuesday's congressional elections, the Republicans lost the House of Representatives and held the Senate. Of the three branches of the federal government, the Democrats regained control of half the legislative power – that is, one-sixth of official Washington. As in the 2016 elections, few people could predict the exact outcome of the 2018 midterms. The so-called "blue wave," which the Democrats were championing, did not reach the Senate. However, the "red tsunami" of the Republicans passed by the House of Representatives. What happened? Behind the façade of the elections in 2018, the political stables became mutually cleared. In the...

Controversial documentary filmmaker Michael Moore on Wednesday said Democratic Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker would lose against President Trump in the 2020 election, suggesting the party should nominate a “beloved American” like Michelle Obama instead. Moore made the comments on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” following the results of the 2018 midterm elections, where Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives. “I think [Trump] is a tumor on our democracy,” Moore said. “But the tumor shrank last night. He has ripped apart and has taken us to the precipice of whether or not we are going to have the country...

President Trump came out of Midterms stronger than ever. It happened in 2016 and it came boomeranging back with a vengeance on Tuesday night. The progressive-left’s playing a new Election Game that can be best described as “even-when-you-win-you-lose because we will never allow winners of whom we do not approve to ever govern”. In a land where politicians get away with stealing everything from the masses, we don’t need to ask, “How did it come to this?”

An undercover sting operation has caught election polling center officials admitting, on a secret video recording, to helping non-citizens vote in the midterms and encouraging voters to choose Democrat candidates because they're "better." James O'Keefe's Project Veritas released the video on Tuesday that shows poll workers at a polling station in Travis County, Texas saying that they've had "tons" of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients voting in the election.

Well, I guess there wasn't a blue wave or a red wave; instead, there was just kind of a puke green splash. The Democrats took the House, by a pretty small margin, beginning at least two years of a divided Congress. And they’ll almost certainly screw it up because they are dumb, crazy, and bad.It’s annoying to lose anything, especially to a party that is so manifestly unworthy, but the nature of an electorate that is split 50/50 is splitting. Chin up. Remember, we have the other half of Congress and the presidency and the courts too, so our agenda...

As word trickled out Tuesday night that Democrats had recaptured the House, likely Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California wasted no time in celebrating the moment. “Tomorrow will be a new day in America,” she proclaimed. But beyond Pelosi’s soaring rhetoric is a harsh political reality: the power to shape the country no longer rests in the House. Instead, the waning influence of America’s legislature is concentrated in the Senate. And unless Democrats can take back the upper chamber, Tuesday’s victory is nothing but political fool’s gold. Here’s why. Most Americans know how Washington, D.C. is supposed to work, with...

Wasn't the "massive influx of hurricane evacuees" supposed to turn Florida into a Democrat stronghold?

A host of prominent celebrities waded into the midterm elections over the past few months to lend their endorsements mostly to far-left Democratic candidates.However, most of these celebrity-endorsed candidates lost their midterm election races. Here are the results of some of the most high-profile endorsements.Taylor SwiftIn perhaps one of the most noticed celebrity endorsements of the midterms, Taylor Swift broke her long political silence to endorse former Tennesse Gov. Phil Bredesen over GOP Rep. Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee’s Senate race.“As much as I have in the past and would like to continue voting for women in office, I cannot support...

The media loves firsts. It's obsessively promoting the first gay governor. The first two Muslim anti-Semitic women in the House, one of whom is accused of marrying her brother (the media obviously isn't mentioning that part), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest elected dimwit. It's oddly uninterested in the first Korean-American woman in the House. Well, not so oddly. Rep. Young Kim is a Republican. Kim, 55, would be the first Korean-American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives if she defeats her Democratic opponent Gil Cisneros for the open seat in California’s 39th Congressional District in Tuesday’s election....

RUSH: I had so many people last night worried that there was actually a blue wave happening. There was no blue wave last night. In fact, let’s look at the record numbers of losses by a sitting president to the opposing party in midterm elections. The most House seats ever lost by a president’s party in power was Obama in 2010. He lost 63. Next was Bill Clinton in 1994. He lost 52. In 1958, Eisenhower lost 48, as did Ford and Nixon in 1974. They lost 48. Lyndon Johnson in ’66, lost 47. Harry Truman in ’46 lost 45...

Republicans knew the House was going to flip. It is common to argue over polling predictions days or weeks in advance, when survey numbers are within a reasonable margin, especially when only one race is in question. But with 435 House races, and so many lining up for Democrat flips, the settled question had become whether a “blue wave” would overturn Washington in a tsunami, even flowing up-ticket for Democrat gubernatorial and U.S. Senate candidates, and whether the President’s agenda would be stymied or even stifled. Ultimately, that “blue wave” proved modest, enough to flip the House as expected but...