Florida’s recount-a-thon has some calling the state ‘a laughingstock’
Senate, governor’s races still in play after first round of ballot tallying
RIVIERA BEACH, Fla. — Florida concluded the first phase of a tumultuous recount of its midterm election Thursday, with the latest results appearing to show that the hotly contested race for the Senate was still so close it would have to go to a manual recount.
State officials did not immediately report the updated ballot counts, but Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, who is leaving office, said he had expanded his lead over the incumbent Democratic senator, Bill Nelson, by an additional 865 votes, to a total of 13,427 votes.
Although that gap would still be narrow enough to trigger a hand recount — which would have to be completed by Sunday — Scott called on Nelson to concede.
“Last week, Florida voters elected me as their next U.S. senator and now the ballots have been counted twice,” Scott said in a statement. “Our state needs to move forward. We need to put this election behind us, and it is time for Bill Nelson to respect the will of the voters and graciously bring this process to an end, rather
than proceed with yet another count of the votes — which will yield the same result, and bring more embarrassment to the state that we both love and have served.”
Nelson was said to be committed to fighting until all his legal options were exhausted, several people close to the three-term senator said.
No statewide results had been reported yet in the race for governor, where Ron DeSantis, the former Republican congressman, held a narrow lead over the mayor of Tallahassee, Andrew Gillum, a Democrat.
But Gillum made it clear he would push to have all ballots — including some of those initially rejected because of mismatched signatures or other problems — counted before any election results are certified.
As of the 3 p.m. deadline for a machine recount of three close statewide contests, nearly all of Florida’s 67 counties — with the exception of Palm Beach and Hillsborough counties — had reported updated results.
But Broward County made the deadline only barely, and other counties ran into problems, raising some questions among some candidates about the reliability of the results.
‘Laughingstock of the world’
“We have been the laughingstock of the world election after election,” U.S. District Judge Mark Walker told lawyers battling over the recount in his Tallahassee courtroom Thursday morning. “Yet we still chose not to fix it.”
The machine recount that began over the weekend ran into significant problems in Palm Beach County. Authorities there said the tabulation equipment came up short “a significant number” of ballots in the final Senate tally, making it impossible for the county to meet the Thursday deadline.
The initial phase of the recount was the subject of about a dozen lawsuits over which ballots would be counted and what deadlines would apply. A federal judge ruled early Thursday that voters whose mailed ballots were rejected because of mismatched signatures should be given a few days to rectify their ballots.
With Palm Beach County unable to produce a final tally in time, lawyers held a hearing in federal court Thursday morning on a Democratic Party effort to get the recount deadlines extended. Walker asked a question none of the lawyers seemed able to answer: Would it be legal to proceed with recount results that are missing one county?
“There is no constitutional right to have your vote counted a second time or a third time,” Mohammad Omar Jazil, a lawyer for the Florida secretary of state, told the court.
Democratic lawyers filed a new lawsuit Thursday afternoon against Palm Beach County, seeking a hand recount of all ballots in the county “due to systematic machine failure during the machine count,” Nelson’s lawyer, Marc Elias, said on Twitter.
The problem in Palm Beach County is with antiquated votecounting machines that do not allow multiple races to be counted simultaneously. The county had put a priority on recounting the Senate race, which was listed first on the ballot.
Officials in Hillsborough County said they could not submit recount totals in time for the deadline because the count had resulted in 846 fewer votes than originally counted. The office had experienced two power outages during the recount that may have led to the discrepancy, they said.
“Conducting a full recount in a constricted time period is extremely challenging,” the county’s supervisor of elections, Craig Latimer, said in a statement.
Mail, provisional ballots
Separately, Walker ruled early Thursday that Florida’s law that allows county election officials to reject vote-by-mail and provisional ballots because voters’ signatures do not match the ones on file threatens to unconstitutionally disenfranchise thousands of voters. His order gives voters whose ballots were invalidated by signature mismatches until 5 p.m. Saturday to resolve the problems with their ballots. The new deadline would apply to a certain number of over 4,000 voters who were notified late that their mail-in ballots had been rejected because of a signature mismatch. Those voters will have until Saturday to confirm their identities.
There are dozens of reasons a signature mismatch may occur, even when the individual signing is in fact the voter,” the judge wrote. “What this case comes down to is that without procedural safeguards, the use of signature matching is not reasonable and may lead to unconstitutional disenfranchisement.”
Scott’s campaign said it was filing an immediate appeal. They emphasized that the ruling applies only to a small subset of people — it is not clearhow many — who had received late notifications about rejected signatures.
“We are immediately appealing this baseless decision and we are confident we will prevail in the 11th Circuit,” a spokeswoman for the Scott campaign, Lauren Schenone, said in a statement.
The Scott campaign lost a separate legal bid in Broward County, where lawyers asked a court to order the county to stop counting ballots that had not been counted in time for Saturday’s initial deadline for vote results.
“We are very hopeful that any future attempts to stop the counting of timely ballots by lawful voters will take heed,” said Myrna Perez, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice, which represented the League of Women Voters and Common Cause in successfully contesting that case.
Nelson filed another suit on Thursday, this one challenging the decision by an elections supervisor in hurricane-damaged Bay County to accept a handful of ballots by fax and email.