'BradCast' 11/15/2018: (FL's 'Recount' Rulings, GA's 'Illegitimate' Election)
On today's 'BradCast':\xa0 Good news for Democrats flipping another GOP U.S. House seat in Maine using Ranked Choice Voting, for a total pickup \u2013 so far -- of 35 U.S. House seats, with several more undecided races still pending. In Florida, a federal judge correctly slammed the state's elections as a "laughingstock" that state officials "choose not to fix."\xa0 In fact, the Republicans who run Florida chose to make voting and counting ballots as difficult as humanly possible. The judge ruled Florida's absentee ballot "signature matching" scheme is unconstitutional, allowing 4,0000 voters whose ballots had been rejected until Saturday at 5pm to cure any problems. With the explosion of Vote-by-Mail across the country, signature matching problems are of increasing concern, particularly among younger voters whose signatures are still developing and older voters whose signatures have changed over time. The same judge also denied an extension for statewide "machine recounts\u201d despite the absurdly short statutory deadline, and counties experiencing problems with their aging, failing computer tabulators. A "manual hand-count" is now underway in Florida in the razor-thin U.S. Senate race between Democrat Sen. Bill Nelson and Republican Gov. Rick Scott, but is limited only to ballots on which the computer scanners recorded no vote in the U.S. Senate race, and must be completed by another arbitrarily short deadline on Sunday. In Georgia, courts ordered the counting of absentee and provisional ballots to continue despite Republican gubernatorial candidate and vote suppressor Brian Kemp calls for the counting to end. Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams' campaign decries Kemp's horrific administration of the election as Secretary of State \u2013 underscored by the moving story of 92-year old African-American grandmother's fight to cast a ballot. Many outside the state -- including Ohio's Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown -- now see any potential Kemp victory as illegitimate. Plus Desi Doyen has the latest 'Green News Report' on California's record wildfires, and new Democrats in the U.S. House moving for bold action on climate change...