Tuesday night has taken the lead over republican martha mcsally. In florida, governor rick scotts lead over senator bill nelson is down from 56,000 votes to just 15,000 votes, well within the margin that could force, would force a recount. The florida governors race between democratic Andrew Gillum and republican ron desantis also now within the threshold for a recount. In georgia, Democrat Stacey Abrams is also hoping to force a runoff, while republicans lashed out trying to spread doubt about the electoral counts by claiming fraud. Heres Governor Scott accusing democrats of, you got it, stealing the election. Weve all seen the incompetence and irregularities in broward and palm beach again. I will not sit idly by while unethical liberals try to steal this election from the great people of florida. Liberals. President trump on a flight to france today took shots at the democrats advances tweeting nine times about the three states that are still in contention. For the very latest im joined by steve kornacki, nbc National Political correspondent. I cant believe were still on Election Night, but here we are Election Night friday. And chris, ill tell you, it really does feel like an Election Night. As you were giving us that introduction, we just got a giant batch of new votes i can tell you about in that Arizona Senate race. About 80,000 just came in, and you can see what its done to the race here. These are from maricopa county. This was Just Announced in the last two minutes. Keir simmo Kyrsten Sinema. Her lead was 10,000 votes, it is now 22,000 votes because of this new batch that just came in. They are from maricopa county, biggest county in the state by far, around phoenix. The margin, im just looking at the math to see exactly what happened. It was about 54,000 new votes that came in for Kyrsten Sinema and about 32,000 new votes that came in for martha mcsally. Whats happening here, chris, is arizona is a heavy mail in voting state. What they have been counting over the last couple of days in maricopa in particular are ballots that were mailed last weekend, you know, a couple days before the election, and the expectation had been that they would favor sinema a little. I think theyre favoring her more than was expected. There are still, even with this batch of votes we just got, there are still probably about 375,000 votes in arizona yet to be counted. Again, a lot of them from maricopa county. Now, republicans are saying they hope that the final batch, which are going to be ballots people dropped off at the polling place on election day might favor mcsally, but shes starting to fall behind thin this race, andt might get to a place where there arent many votes that are favorable to her. What about florida . Whats going on there . A lot of us have been trying to figure out what goes on with Broward County and why its friday night, and were still counting . Yeah, so this is the deal. In the senate race right heerre the margin is as you can see, nelson is a little less than 15,000 votes behind rick scott. You can see this is 2 10 of a point. If its less than a quarter of a percent, it will automatically trigger not just a recount, but a manual recount. This means theyre not running them through the machines. Theyre also going to take them out and examine them by hand. Its that close. We expect between now and tomorrow, tomorrow night the deadline for these counties to finalize their counts. We do expect there are provisional ballots from around the state that are going to be counted. Expect them to favor nelson. Probably going to net him a couple thousand more votes. That should shrink a little but may still be behind rick scott there going into the recount. Broward you mentioned, though, this is very interesting because obviously huge county, 2 Million People live here. Hugely democratic county. Heres the thing they have found, in this senate race in florida, about 25,000 fewer votes were cast in the senate race than in the governors race. People got the same ballot and on 25,000 ballots or so there was just no marking on the senate race, and what it appears happened here is that the design of the ballot in Broward County essentially took that senate race and buried it in the lower left corner of the ballot. You had a big long instruction column. The senate race was down here. Meanwhile, the governors race is squarely in the middle, top of the page, widely spaced out, and so did about 25,000 people in this county of 2 million, this heavily democratic county at 2 million, did they just miss the senate race . That could potentially when you look at how nelson is winning broward here, if those 25,000 we didnt see any like this in any other county in the state, if those 25,000 had voted at that rate, youre talking 8, 10,000 extra votes for nelson that he would net in a race where right now again statewide less than 15,000. It reminds me of those old days when people down in Palm Beach County who had no reason to like Pat Buchanans politics voted for pat by accident because of the crazy ballot. That butterfly ballot. Even buchanan said they were not votes for me. They were votes for gore. Its nice to hear honesty, even in the crudest form. Thank you so much. Amazing work this week. Im joined now by an election law specialist whos associated with the bill Nelson Campaign in florida. And of course susan delpercio. Thank you all. Ron, you start. Briefly, we could probably spend a year trying to figure out by the way my question, a real simple question, why cant the whole country have one measure of voting, one type of machine. We can all be taught like mr. Rogers when were 8 years old, all taught how to vote, and everybody votes the same way. Its all counted the same way. Its all an paper, and theres no more of this crapola every election where were trying to figure out whats going on on tuesday on friday . Your thoughts is it ever going to happen . If only we could have one machine and one uniform system countrywide, it would certainly make things more efficient. Look, the florida law gives supervisors of elections, 67 of them around the state until noon tomorrow to turn in their first unofficial votes. So the fact that we havent yet got to a final vote point, its disappointing to those of us who want instant gratification to know who is the winner and who is the loser, but the fact is the system allows for a deliberate counting process so that everybodys vote is counted. Thats whats so important and critical here. The delay isnt anything other than a desire by the supervisors to make sure that all votes are counted and counted properly. Is there a category of votes that dont get counted on election day by nature because theyre overseas or whatever . Well, we have overseas ballots that come in later. We have a lot of ballots that are being contested as well. Florida has a requirement in the law for signature matches for vote by mail ballots or for provisional ballots, and there are no standards for determining whether signatures match. So there are literally tens of thousands of ballots that have been rejected. We submit arbitrarily by supervisors of elections that need to be counted. These are people who voted properly and depending on where you live, your vote might be counted or it might not be counted. Thats another source of the delay. Well go into the recount tomorrow when the first official, unofficial results are tendered. Were going to go into a machine recount, and that could very well further alter the results because all of the under votes and over votes will be segreg e segregated out by the tabulating equipment, and if was earlier mentioned were less than a quarter of a percent difference between the two candidates, those over votes and under votes will then be physically examined by the canvassing teams to determine whether theres some voter intent that can be gleaned. This election is not over yet. The statutes contemplate a deliberate process to maximize the number of ballots that are counted. Now, if youre ahead in the polling, obviously you dont want to do anything that might change that result. Those are the kind of delay tactics and fear tactics we hear from the people such as Governor Scott who are right now marginally up in the election. He doesnt want these processes to unfold because it might result in a different result. Of course we understand that. Thank you so much ron meyer for your expertise. I want to bring in jason and susan now. It is such a nostalgic moment in the negative say, because you know, 18 years ago and my favorite thing we ever covered around here was the recount in florida. Youd see people looking up at these ballots, and the person who was from al gore said thats a good one. The person who was for george w. Said thats no good. Youd think we would have learned something since high school. We should be more advanced. Part of the issue here is that theres no uniformity even within the states. Within the states there should be some uniformity about how the ballots operate. The design of the ballots. Even the design of the ballots or the language. Why would they put the senate vote down at the lefthand corner. And hide it when those are the two races driving the top of the ticket. Thats what bothers me about what rick scott is doing or what we see brian kemp is doing in georgia. We have got to find a way, i hope whatever people get into office find a way to keep these elected officials from toying with and mocking with elections that theyre on the line for. Rick scott shouldnt be threatening to send in cops. Speaking of which, even before the election last weekend, were into this weekend, last weekend brian kemp, the secretary of state of georgia who wants the other job of being the candidate for governor was claiming fraud there. He was saying there was hacking into the system by the democrats, and now we have the governor of florida, also the candidate for the United States senate in florida claiming voter fraud down there because the democrats want the count to continue until its done . Well, heres the funny thing. Just so you know on that recount, if they move to a hand count in florida, they have to be separate counts for governor and then a separate count for senate, so at least two hand counts may be in play, which is also mind boggling. I think what we see here is something that happens when elections are close. Republicans have called for a recount. Democrats call for a recount. When its this close because we know it can come down to a couple of hundred votes. We should not be as a country, we should be supporting everyone who voted. People took the time, people took the energy. We had a lot of new voters out there and we have systems that are changing as well. States are diameteriadapting tos and regulations as far as absentee ballots. Here in new york we had more paper jams because our ballots were double sided and we had a third sheet that we had to look at. Its crazy. Let me ask you about the week and how it looks now. Mid evening tuesday night we had somebody come on the show and said no way. But then wait a minute, the democrats might get twice the votes they needed. They may get up to over 40 potentially now still, and of course theyre still picking away at the senate. They got another senate seat, they look like they have a good shot at it in arizona. The two women out west, arizona and nevada both won, thats potential and in florida even when it looked pretty dismal Election Night, the fights going on. Its a slow moving wave. Its almost like a caravan. Its moving very slow. Heres the thing i think you devil. The republicans need to understand, its like this is why i said this is a wave, and this is why this is dangerous. All of this happened, all of these seats state houses flipped, the midwest, which ive been saying all along, these governors races were so key. That was trumps victory area. Exactly. People have to recognize this happened with great unemployment. This happened under a great economy. In 2020 if this economy is not doing as well as it is now, republicans are in trouble. Did you notice that people are like we didnt even cover these races, they were such sweeps, way before we started counting Election Night, there were people like bobby casey in pennsylvania by like 10 points. Sherrod brown another big victory, they all swept reelection in the states that had gone for trump, and nobody even talked about it because it was a foregone conclusion. Then of course the marginal cases came through. Im wondering whether we miss add big part of the story in not counting all those democratic victories in the midwest and northeast. They certainly were tremendous. When we look at polls in the media, we see the horse race. When we look at polls in a campaign, we are continstantly looking for gettable votes. There were only the tried and true turnout model of midterm voters, base voters. Thats all we could get. The democrats saw that if they could get their message out, they could reach new voters. They could reach nontraditional midterm voters, and thats where the energy went, and thats really where i think all of us kind of missed seeing this wave coming is the amount of increased participation with new and nontraditional midterm voters. Also, i think that democrats being people that fall in love rather than fall in line, they do work with their hearts and there was so much heart in those races that gillum would win, that abrams would win, that beto would win in texas. These were long shots. They were heavenly hopes, and because they didnt win with their heavenly hopes, at least not yet in florida and georgia, it wasnt a great night, but by any normal standard when you pick up twice the number of seats and take over the house of representatives and the power to set tax law and protect social security, medicaid, medicare and obamacare, all that power comes from controlling the pursestrings of the federal government, all won on tuesday night. Thank you very much, ron meyer, jason johnson, and susan dellpercio. Coming up, have we met . Looks like donald trump knew Matt Whitaker before he didnt know Matt Whitaker. Why is trump covering up his ties to the new acting attorney general . Plus, the nra bashes the medical community for labeling firearms a Public Health risk. Tell that to the shooting victims families. President trump said he had nothing to do with those hush money payments to those women who said he had affairs with him. 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Statements like those are fueling outrage over the president s decision to pick this obscure loyalist whos never been confirmed by the senate for any job to effectively hijack the special counsels probe. Now the president s trying to contain the damage. In a feeble attempt to distance himself from his hand picked attorney general, trump today claimed five times that he didnt know Matt Whitaker at all. I dont know Matt Whitaker. Matt whitaker works for Jeff Sessions. I didnt know Matt Whitaker. Now, in all fairness to Matt Whitaker, who, again, i didnt know. Matt whitaker is a