Donald Trump went off again about the “horrible history” of voting in Broward County, suggesting fraud in a very specific way. It’s not just that “All of the sudden, they are finding votes out of nowhere, and Rick Scott who won—it was close, but he won by a comfortable margin—every couple of hours, he goes down a little bit.” (Psst: In a close race, we don't know who won until all the votes are counted.) No, Trump had a more specific theory of fraud:
And then you see the people, and they were involved in the fraud of the fake dossier, and I guess I hear they were somehow involved with the GPS Fusion people…
Hmmm … where could Trump have come up with Fusion GPS? Sean Hannity, of course:
HANNITY: I cannot -- to me, this is the single biggest abuse of power in an election I have seen, and they have Marc Elias the guy at the heart of the whole Perkins Coie, Fusion GPS, Clinton bought and paid for dossier, leading the way?
Marc Elias is the top Democratic elections lawyer in the country. He was the lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and, in that capacity, hired Fusion GPS to do opposition research, which is completely standard in campaigns. The fact that they came up with connections between Trump and Russia and reports of a pee tape is about Trump, not about the fact that the Clinton campaign’s lawyer hired an opposition research firm. For the rest of time Democrats in tough races are supposed to go to the next-best elections lawyer because Elias came up with something unexpected one time? (Yes, of course, Republicans would very much like for Democrats to lost a powerful weapon.)
Broward County elections officials may not be conducting the smoothest and fastest vote count in the history of vote counts, but this is certainly not the slowest or most troubled count we’ve seen in recent years, either. The only reason Republicans have offered that there’s anything amiss is that they don’t like the way the votes are coming in and if Democrats are getting votes, it must be bad. Trump is casting doubt on Arizona in the same vein, saying that “It's always the Democrats. … Now in Arizona, all of a sudden, out of the wilderness, they find a lot of votes.” Because again, votes are suspect to Republicans.