As the votes tallies trickled on Election Night, all available signs indicated that Florida had blown the 2018 midterms in spectacular fashion, elevating noted not-racist Ron DeSantis to the governor's mansion and shameless liar Rick Scott to the United States Senate, both by the narrowest of margins. It turns out that the state has also screwed up these contests in a separate, time-honored Florida manner: election logistics.

Since Tuesday, the gaps between Scott and incumbent Rick Nelson and DeSantis and Andrew Gillum have eroded to the point where both races are within the 0.5 percentage-point threshold that, under state law, triggers a mandatory recount. Nelson has retained prominent election attorney Marc Elias in anticipation of said recount, while Gillum has backtracked slightly on his concession, saying that he is "looking forward to seeing every vote counted."

Ground zero for the apparent slow-motion comeback is Broward County, where officials are running well behind the rest of the state in reporting results, especially with respect to provisional ballots. There are also indications that the county began the process of tripping over its own red tape before the election even took place; in some precincts, significant discrepancies between the number of people who participated in the Senate race but not the governor's race suggest that shoddy ballot design caused some voters to miss the Senate race altogether. (It appeared in the lower left corner, beneath lengthy how-to-vote instructions that are easy to gloss over.) None of these terms have quite the same ring as "hanging chad," but the consequence of this alleged incompetence—potentially miscast or uncast votes—is the same.

One important fact about Broward County is that it is a heavily Democratic area; of the voters there who did manage to fill in all the bubbles correctly, nearly 70 percent of them backed the Democractic candidates. Thus, while officials work to clear their stacks of provisional ballots—and as DeSantis' and Scott's respective leads continue to shrink—Republican politicians have responded in kind by melting the fuck down. Marco Rubio, who normally can't be bothered to do anything but tweet passive-aggressive Bible verses, has spent the last 24 hours constructing an elaborate, delusional plot on social media in which "Democrat lawyers" are "descending on Florida" with the express purpose not of counting votes, but of stealing an election.

He softened his stance a bit after his constituents promptly spit-roasted him, claiming that he wholeheartedly supports the automatic recount effort. (Yes, it is hilarious that Rubio felt the need to clarify that he is in favor of following the law; yes, it is hilarious that he is incapable of displaying political courage even when the initial position on which he flip-flops amounts to tinfoil-hat inanity.) But he continues to rail against the alleged misfeasance of Broward County election officials, which leads to the incoherent conclusion that Marco Rubio believes that all Americans' ballots should be counted, unless they aren't counted fast enough for his liking.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Scott filed suit against Broward County elections supervisor Brenda Snipes, asserting without further explanation that "rampant fraud" is taking place on her watch. “I will not sit idly by while unethical liberals try to steal this election,” he said. Donald Trump, who never misses an opportunity to engage in some evidence-free voter fraud fearmongering, has accused Fusion GPS, the outfit behind the 2016 opposition research "dossier," of helping election officials find "votes out of nowhere." (This mad lib of Trump-adjacent conspiracy theories stems from the fact that Elias, Nelson's lawyer, works at a law firm that represented the Clinton campaign, which prompted Sean Hannity to mention it on TV, which is why the President of the United States now wholeheartedly believes it.)

The fact that Broward County is slow at counting votes does not somehow mean that votes should not be counted. "Elections should reflect the will of the people to the greatest extent possible" seems like an uncontroversial principle, no matter which candidate comes out on top. But this is the modern Republican Party we are talking about, and determining whose votes matter—and more crucially, whose votes don't—is a key component of their political strategy.