Did Wasserman Schultz Steal Her Reelection Against Tim Canova?

By the final week of the FL-23 congressional primary, blockheads in the media didn't want to talk about anything substantive, nothing about issues or about Debbie Wasserman Schultz's hideous record in Congress or at the DNC. To the small pack of jackel-like reporters covering the race in the final week it was all about one non-issue: "where was Bernie?" Why wasn't he in the district campaigning for Tim? Had he "made a deal?" Totally silly and certainly not what a single south Florida voter needed to be thinking about as they were deciding who to vote for in this potentially momentous primary.

On Tuesday, August 30, I was getting reports all day that Tim Canova was absolutely walking away with the election against the corruption-scarred Wasserman Schultz. The calls and e-mails were similar to the ones that had been coming in during early voting week: massive enthusiasm and unexpectedly large turnout for Tim Canova and there just weren't voters turning out for Wasserman Schultz after her reputation had been shredded by a series of horribly ugly revelations that pointed to both her unsavory character and her pro-corporate/pay-to-play congressional and personal agenda.

The mood among Canova's dedicated volunteers was jubilant as well, although Tim had warned me a week earlier that they had been shut out of the largely Jewish condo complexes where absentee voting was organized and that Wasserman Schultz had that all very tightly wired. He didn't seem to think the absentee ballots would win her reelection though.

Yesterday, the screen shot above arrived in my mailbox. It's the "placeholder page" on NBC channel 6's website at 9:06 pm Monday evening, August 29th, the night before the primary Election Day. Since no votes had yet been counted, the placeholder page shows all the races at 0-0 with 0 precincts reporting, except for one race: Wasserman Schultz 58%, Canova 42% with 69% of precincts reporting. (Keep in the back of your mind that NBC is a subsidiary of Comcast, Wasserman Schultz's single biggest donor-- $28,200 this cycle alone-- after she took their side in the Communication Workers of America strike.)

My sister lives in Hollywood. She called me and then called NBC 6 to ask for an explanation and they hung up on her and quickly rectified the placeholder page to show the FL-23 race to also be 0-0 with 0 reporting, just like every other race. It was disconcerting and neither she nor I could understand what had just happened. She suggested that a U.S. Attorney should be investigating the electronic history of NBC 6, both in posting early returns before ballots were counted-- or even cast-- and in any electronic communications between NBC 6 and the Supervisor of Elections in Broward County. I was just stunned and have been stunned ever since.

And, suddenly, it was over; she won:

• Wasserman Schultz- 28,279 (57%)
• Canova- 21,504 (43%)

Where did those numbers come from? Any of those numbers? Could Wasserman Schultz, who had just spent a year trying to fix the results if the presidential primary in state after state for Hillary, really steal the election in her own district? And would she if she could? Undermine democracy itself like that? Short of Rahm Emanuel, I can't think of a single more likely culprit to suspect of that kind of behavior.

Let's hope Tim runs again in 2018. This whole episode reminds me of what happened to Donna Edwards whence ran against a similar corrupt Democrat in Maryland the first time. The whole Democratic establishment ganged up against Donna in favor of Al Wynn and when it looked like Donna won on election night, Wynn's thugs showed up at the last minute with a ballot box that had been "found," stuffed with ballots for him, enough to swing the close election. She ran against him 2 years later and kicked his ass out of Congress and onto K Street.