Fla. Senate contest goes to hand recount
Desantis appears to win gubernatorial election
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida’s acrimonious battle for the U.S. Senate headed to a legally required hand recount Thursday after an initial review by ballot-counting machines showed Republican Gov. Rick Scott and Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson separated by less than 13,000 votes.
But the contest for governor between Republican Ron Desantis and Democrat Andrew Gillum appeared to be over, with a machine recount showing Desantis with a large enough advantage over Gillum to avoid a hand recount in that race.
Gillum said in a statement that “it is not over until every legally casted vote is counted.”
The recount has been fraught with problems. One large Democratic stronghold in South Florida was unable to finish its machine recount by the Thursday deadline due to machines breaking down. A federal judge rejected a request to extend the recount deadline.
“We gave a heroic effort,” said
Palm Beach Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher. If the county had three or four more hours, it would have made the deadline to recount ballots in the Senate race, she said.
Meanwhile, election officials in another urban county decided against turning in the results of their machine recount, which came up with 846 fewer votes than originally counted. And media in South Florida reported that Broward County finished its machine recount but missed the deadline by a few minutes.
Counties were ordered this past weekend to do a machine recount of three races because the margins were so tight. The next stage is a manual review of ballots that were not counted by machines to see if there is a way to figure out voter intent.
Scott called on Nelson to end the recount battle.
It’s time for 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,” the governor said in a statement.
The margin between Scott and Nelson had not changed much in the last few days, conceded Marc Elias, an attorney working for Nelson’s campaign. But he said that he expected the vote tally to shrink due to the hand recount and a ruling on signatures.