Protect Our Elections, a liberal-leaning group based in Washington, D.C., says more than 160,000 votes in Florida weren't counted during last month's presidential election. The group claims each of those votes matters a great deal because Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 112,911 votes in the Sunshine State. Trump won by roughly 1.5 percent, a margin high enough to avoid the state's automatic-recount provisions.
But last Friday, Protect Our Elections sued the state to contest the election, possibly throwing President-elect Trump's transition into an even greater state of turmoil.
For the past 30 days, failed Green Party candidate Jill Stein has launched a much-ballyhooed (but perfectly legal) attempt to recount votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, forcing the country to grapple with the question of exactly how hackable our election system really is. But despite how crucial Florida's 29 Electoral College votes are to the election, nobody has thrown Florida's election results under the microscope until now.
After raising more than $65,000 online, Protect Our Elections sued to contest the election at 11:48 p.m. Friday, a scant 12 minutes before the state's election-lawsuit deadline. The group claims citing what looks to be extremely shaky evidence the vote totals do not include "tens of thousands" of legal votes that weren't counted because of alleged vote-machine malfunctions, but do include "tens of thousands of illegal votes that were improperly counted."
