Florida Drop Box Issue and a Potential Florida Hail Mary to Throw Out Ballots or Invalidate the Election

I had not been keeping an eye on this issue flagged by Brian Beutler:

This concern about challenged ballots commingling with unchallenged ballots isn’t limited to Pennsylvania, and even raises the specter of Republicans engineering situations that allow them to circumvent vote counting: by kettling absentee voters into submitting ballots in ways and at times that leaves them vulnerable to legal challenges, waiting until those ballots have been commingled with the rest, and then declaring it impossible to determine the “legitimate” winner.

Last week, the general counsel to the Florida department of state issued guidance to election officials asserting that secure ballot drop boxes must be staffed by humans at all times. Scores of thousands of ballots have already passed through drop boxes that do not meet this criterion.

Slate legal writer Mark Joseph Stern noted that though this guidance lacks support in state law, it may nevertheless form the basis of a GOP legal challenge. “Presuming supervisors ignore McVay’s guidance, Florida’s largest counties will collect a huge number of absentee ballots in a manner deemed unlawful by the Department of State,” he writes. “If Joe Biden narrowly wins the state in November, Florida’s Republican-controlled government could argue that these ballots should be thrown out because they were cast through an illegal process. That claim could give rise to litigation that might allow the federal judiciary to call election results into question and invalidate ballots.”

As in Pennsylvania, though, the biggest risk may not be that Trump and the GOP will successfully challenge some ballots. It’s that those invalid ballots will have been irretrievably commingled with unchallenged ones. Republicans wouldn’t succeed in helping Trump throw out Democratic votes; they’d succeed in making a full count impossible.

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