Given the size of Rick Scott’s lead in the race for a United States Senate seat from Florida and Ron DeSantis’s lead in the race to be the state’s governor, most election experts agree there’s little chance that even the most exquisitely careful recount would deny these two Republicans victory.

Yet both men are not only acting as if it’s 2000 all over again, when control of the White House hinged on a few hundred votes in Florida, they are also fanning conspiratorial flames with claims of outrageous fraud, seconded by President Trump.

The flimsiness of their charges can be measured by the response they’ve gotten not from their political adversaries but from some of their allies.

Mr. Scott, who as governor is overseeing his election to become senator, asked his Department of Law Enforcement to investigate this supposedly rampant fraud in Democratic-controlled Broward County. No real accusations to investigate, he was told. At a court hearing at which Republicans asked him to impound voting machines in Broward County, a county judge who had been appointed by a Republican governor, Jeb Bush, told everyone to calm down.