While Florida election officials race to finish recounting tens of thousands of votes from last Tuesday’s election, Republican Governor Rick Scott—who leads incumbent Senator Bill Nelson by some 12,000 votes, and closing—has already declared victory. On Wednesday, Scott turned up on Capitol Hill for this week’s freshman orientation for new senators, where he had his picture taken with Mitch McConnell. Scott’s attendance is unprecedented, but, Republicans say, wholly defensible. “As far as we’re concerned, he is the senator-elect,” Scott campaign spokesperson Chris Hartline told the Daily Caller, arguing that it would be “mathematically impossible” for Nelson to catch up. “There’s no reason why he wouldn’t participate in leadership elections and other orientation activities.”

The odds that Nelson can flip the race are indeed slim. Election workers have only until 3 P.M. on Thursday to finish recounting votes in the Scott-Nelson race, as well as the gubernatorial race between Republican Ron DeSantis and Democrat Andrew Gillum. That’s a small window of time to close the gap in both races. (The election of DeSantis, in particular, appears to be a foregone conclusion.) If they can’t finish in time, Florida law mandates that the elections default back to the results from election night. But after Democrat Kyrsten Sinema unexpectedly pulled ahead to win a Senate seat in Arizona, Scott’s D.C. trip reeks of desperation. Florida, after all, is a notoriously weird state—recall the surreality of the 2000 Bush-Gore race, if you dare—and infamously incompetent when it comes to conducting elections.

Republicans from Florida Senator Marco Rubio to President Donald Trump have been accusing Florida officials in left-leaning counties of everything from light corruption to outright fraud as Democrats “find” more and more votes for Nelson. But the real problem appears to be quintessential Florida-style ineptitude. As the results narrowed last Tuesday, pollsters and analysts discovered that 3.7 percent of voters in Broward County who voted in the governor’s race did not vote in the Senate race, likely because of a poorly designed ballot. Former questions about the competency of Election Supervisors Susan Bucher and Brenda Snipes—particularly Snipes, who was successfully sued for removing a ballot amendment, and punished in 2016 for destroying ballots too soon—gave the Republicans an opening to question the race’s legitimacy. (”[If] you look at the person, in this case a woman, involved, she has had a horrible history,” Trump said last week.) Miami officials had to debunk claims that pallets full of ballots were going uncounted, held by nefarious forces to influence the election. (It didn’t help that small numbers of uncounted ballots did pop up in unexpected places.) And on Tuesday, in the middle of a machine recount of hundreds of thousands of early ballots in Palm Beach County, their voting machines overheated and died, forcing the county to re-start its recount of about 175,000 votes. “[It] appears that royally messing up U.S. elections has become a Florida pastime, and the Sunshine State has finally gone too far,” David von Drehle, a former Miami Herald reporter, wrote for The Washington Post. “We’re trying to save democracy, Florida. Please stop screwing around.”

And yet, the screwing continues in earnest. Scott has filed no less than five lawsuits since last week, including one asking a Florida court to block Broward County from including ballots not counted in the unofficial returns, and two demanding that the voting machines in Broward and Palm Beach counties be impounded—a request that a federal judge denied. His campaign has declared that he will not recuse himself from the recount, and that “he’s not going to lose unless they steal it from him in court.” Nelson and the Democrats, meanwhile, have filed multiple lawsuits of their own seeking to extend the deadline for counting the first round of balloting, and challenging a provision that would examine whether voters filled in bubbles correctly. A third suit accuses several county election supervisors of not complying with laws requiring the preservation of digital scans of ballots. (A fourth lawsuit, filed by Common Cause Florida and League of Women Voters of Florida, would prevent Scott from having a role in the recount.)