Florida starts painstaking hand recount in Senate race
Machines couldn’t record nearly 31,000 ballots in Broward Co.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – Volunteers gathered around folding tables Friday to begin a painstaking hand recount in Florida’s acrimonious U.S. Senate contest, with a goal of determining the intent of about 93,000 voters whose ballots for Republican Gov. Rick Scott or Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson could not be counted by machine.
The hand recount is required by state law when candidates are separated by 0.25 percentage points or less.
Unofficial results showed Scott ahead of Nelson by 0.15 percentage points, or fewer than 13,000 votes out of more than 8 million cast.
In Broward County, officials relied on a color-coded system to tally some of the last ballots by hand.
Ballots with clear votes for Republican Gov. Rick Scott went into a bin with a red tag. Clear votes for Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson went into one with a blue tag. Blank ballots went into a bin with a yellow tag. Anything that needed further examination was dropped into one with a green tag.
Dozens of volunteers sitting behind the bins stacked on folding tables in a Broward County warehouse cheered loudly when they finished their hand recount Friday morning. Results were not immediately announced.
At the election supervisor’s office in Tampa, volunteers were joined by observers from both political parties at 12 tables as the recount started.
The ballots were in a locked wire basket on a rolling cart when they were delivered to the room. An elections office employee cut the lock off the basket, and the ballots were distributed to the tables, where teams of two volunteers examined each one.
The hand recount does not review all votes. It involves ballots that were not recorded by voting machines because voters cast either two votes for one race, which is called an overvote, or appeared to choose no candidate, which is an undervote. The idea is to figure out a voter’s intent.
Broward County – which experienced numerous problems throughout the election – had the most overvotes and undervotes of any Florida county – almost 31,000.
Just a day earlier, the county missed the deadline to submit its machine recount results by two minutes. But it finished its manual recount in a few hours, which Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes attributed to the large number of volunteers assembled for the task.
The contest for governor appeared all but over Thursday, with a machine recount showing Republican DeSantis with a large enough advantage over Democrat Andrew Gillum to avoid a hand recount in that race, which had a margin of 0.41 percent.
Gillum, who conceded on election night only to retract his concession later, said that “it is not over until every legally casted vote is counted.”
On Thursday, the situation drew the ire of U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, who slammed the state for repeatedly failing to anticipate election problems. He also said the state law on recounts appears to violate the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that decided the presidency in 2000.
Florida voters have until 5 p.m. Saturday to show a valid identification and fix their ballots if they haven’t been counted due to mismatched signatures.