[King:] Today, questions of time and votes in Florida. The deadline to stop the machine recount, now just hours away. Palm Beach County looks certain to miss it. Also this morning, more signs of what you might call counting creep. A judge ruled Florida voters with signature discrepancies now have until Saturday to validate their ballots. The ruling adds about 4,000 total votes to over eight million cast. Now, that's a small number. So small that even if every one of those was validated and broke for the Democrat, it would be too small of a number to erase the Republican lead in the Senate race. The hope now for Democrats, though, is that the court has already shown its willingness to overlook or bend the letter of the law and that it would do so again. CNN's Ed Lavandera down in Tallahassee tracking all this play out. Ed, lawyers for the Nelson campaign in court this morning. Did the judge push back the recount deadline?
[Ed Lavandera, Cnn Correspondent:] We're still waiting to hear what's going to happen on that front. But all of these lawsuits and hearings swirling around here in Tallahassee, John. And as you mentioned, this is coming as the deadline for the end of the recount coming up here in the next couple of hours in the state of Florida, and we're hearing report of various counties across the state wrapping up. But there are a number of hearings that are still playing out this afternoon here in Tallahassee in the federal courthouse you see behind me where basically one judge is handling the bulk of all of these lawsuits and these questions and these hearings that must be sifted through here in the coming days. And, as you mentioned, that signature issue, that deadline gets pushed back to Saturday. That affects nearly more than 4,000 votes here in the state of Florida. But as you rightly mentioned, John, it doesn't really appear, even if all of those people voted for Senator Bill Nelson, which is highly unlikely, wouldn't really affect the outcome of this race. But this is just one of many cases and hearings that are continuing to play through the courts here this afternoon in Tallahassee, John.
[King:] Ed Lavandera on the ground for us. Ed, raise your hand and come back if anything comes out of the court in the rest of the hour here, obviously, and we'll keep on watching it throughout the day as the deadline approaches. Let's come into the room. These I mean unless something outside of the norm happens, and Florida recounts, we'll have to say, are inside the norm, for better or worse, it's almost impossible no one has a scenario that the Democrats overtake in the Senate race, overtake in the governor's race. This is no recount, on the record anyway, has ever erased a lead that big, and yet the president and other Republicans are so animated about this. I want to read this from the president because it's just reckless. I could use a stronger word. But, here we go. The Republicans didn't win and that's because of potentially illegal votes, which is what I've been saying for a long time. I have no doubt about it. And I've seen it. I've had friends talk about it. When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again, nobody takes anything. It's really a disgrace what's going on. To me it's a disgrace that the president of the United States would say such stuff.
[Perry:] We do have a voting problem, which is that about half of the people in the country did not vote in this midterm, despite all of this attention, you know, we gave to it here and so on. That is a problem. I don't know anyone who wants to vote more than once. And you've seen these lines all over the country. We can't get people to vote for less than three hours. The idea that people are driving around is
[King:] Right.
[Bacon:] Look at how Jeff Flake and Martha McSally, Republicans, have handled the process. There's an honorable way to do this. It would be great if the president considered this.
[King:] There's an honorable way to do it when, you know, this happens. Now, do you want your elections counted faster? Do you want to push your state wherever you live to say, can we do this more quickly? That's fine. Do that. But there's no in Arizona, for example, right, the president was saying, what's happen, what's happening? He criticized Martha McSally in this interview with "The Daily Caller" saying why wasn't she calling out fraud? She wasn't calling out fraud because there was no evidence
[Bacon:] There wasn't any fraud.
[King:] There was no evidence of fraud. It's just how they count the votes. The president also says, and help me with this one, please. If you buy, you know, a box of cereal, if you do anything, you have a voter ID. Well, over here, the only thing you don't is if you're a voter of the United States. What?
[Lucey:] He's made versions of this comment before about going to the grocery store and the ID. I'm not sure when he's last been to a grocery store or bought a box of cereal for that matter, but there is obviously no evidence of needing an ID to do this. But this gets back into a long standing lament that we've seen from the president. He is very comfortable questioning the validity of these elections and sewing these
[King:] And when he does when he does, more often than not, almost always I would say, if not always, it's illegal immigrants, Latinos or African-Americans.
[Hulse:] I know where
[King:] You can connect the dots at home, people.
[Keith:] Yes, he is very comfortable sort of undermining democratic institutions in a way that past presidents and most politicians shy away from. You know, the reason that the 2000 recall or the 2000 recount ended, yes, the Supreme Court ruled, but it could have gone further and Al Gore conceded. He didn't claim fraud, he conceded. And often that's how elections end. You know, America doesn't do close elections particularly well. And typically you need the politicians to all agree that the process is the process.
[King:] Right. And the president makes these broad, sweeping, he lost the popular vote because five or six million illegal immigrants illegally voted. Let me flap my wings and fly. But, to be fair, to be fair, is there a distinction? This is Hillary Clinton talking about Georgia. The Democratic candidate, Stacey Abrams, for Georgia governor, has not conceded. She contends there was voter suppression. She also says there are votes still to be counted. Among those saying there's a problem in Georgia is Hillary Clinton.
[Hillary Clinton , Former Presidential Candidate:] I know Stacey well. She was one of my really strong surrogates in the campaign. If she'd had a fair election, she already would have won. She is really in the arena and she is fighting for the right to vote and have your vote counted. And I don't know what the outcome will be, but God bless her for continuing that fight and not walking away.
[King:] Now, that that language there is tame-ish, if you will, but there have been Democrats who have said stolen, who have said fraud in Georgia. Is there evidence to back it up?
[Hulse:] I don't I don't know exactly how it's playing out. I think what she is referring to, Secretary Clinton, was some of the things that happened before the election. You know, closing polling places, moving things out. And, plus, in that election, her opponent was the one running the election. So that was also, I think, sort of a troubling situation. It strikes me about the president that certain things stick with him about these elections. He's I think he's referring again to Bernard Langer, the golfer, remember that incident, where he thought he was going to be able to vote there. The signature issue is real. It's the new hanging chad. And I think people are just discovering this. I think that the Republicans are way over the line in the in the language that they're using down there, undermining these elections. But it goes to show you how worried they are. They don't want to have another election get away from them in the Senate. Now, is it a huge difference, one more in the Senate? But it's a big difference. And it's also a state that the president's probably going to needs to win
[Lucey:] Yes, the president wants control of that state for 2020.
[Hulse:] Right.
[King:] So get your monitors in the room. Be aggressive watching the vote count. Be as aggressive as you can be within the law. I'm all for that. But for the president of the United States to allege these vast conspiracies, again, taxpayer funded, you're paying, it's a lie. Up next, Nancy Pelosi's growing math problem as more House Democrats say they will not back her to be speaker.