Suits seek to extend recount deadlines
Nelson says some voters would be disenfranchised
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Tuesday he wants the federal courts to throw out Florida’s recount deadlines, arguing that they’re too tight to fully check all the votes in his tight contest for re-election that — for the time being — Gov. Rick Scott is winning.
Nelson’s claim, contained in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the northern district of Florida, asserts that the likelihood that Palm Beach County can’t complete vote counting by the deadlines and the possibility that Broward might not be able to would disenfranchise too many voters.
If any counties can’t get ballots recounted on schedule, the state Elections Canvassing Commission uses the previous round of results to certify a final winner. That isn’t fair, Nelson and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee argued.
Chris Hartline, spokesman for Scott’s Senate campaign, said the Nelson campaign wants to bypass Florida law. “Just so it’s clear: our campaign has filed lawsuits to make sure that Florida law (which is designed to protect against fraud) is followed. @SenBillNelson and the liberal groups backing him have filed lawsuits to disregard Florida law and count unlawful ballots,” Hartline said on Twitter.
Also on Tuesday, Broward County finally started recounting ballots from last week’s midterm election.
Late Tuesday morning, the Supervisor of Elections Office finished the process of separating first page of the ballots — the page that contains the races that need to be recounted — from all the other pages, reports said.
Page One has the contests that are part of the statewide recount: U.S. Senate, governor and state agriculture commissioner.
Broward County attorney Drew Meyers said he was in contact with his staff at the elections office, who told him the machine recount was on track to be com-
pleted by 6 a.m. Thursday.
Broward has been the focus of national attention because of the slow pace of the initial round of vote counting from the election and the slow start to the recount, which was ordered by the state on Saturday for the three contests in which the margin was less than .05 percent of the vote.
“We’ll complete the recount. There’s never been a deadline that we have missed,” Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes said Tuesday.
Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher said her office is “close to finishing” counting in the Senate race.
In Palm Beach County, the recount started Saturday afternoon. MiamiDade County also started recounting over the weekend, and elections officials said about half the ballots were counted by Monday. Some counties, including Orange, didn’t start until Monday.
The deadline to report results in the statewide recount is 3 p.m. Thursday. That concerns the machine recount.
The issue in the Nelson lawsuit is what happens if the machine recount, using automated tabulation devices, finds a difference of 0.25 percent or less. In that case, votes that couldn’t be read by the machines because voters made stray marks or voted for more than one candidate or voted in a way that didn’t register are reviewed manually.
State law provides three days — from Thursday to Sunday for a manual recount. “A manual recount of the Senate race is, at this point, an inevitability,” said the lawsuit from Nelson and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
And, the lawsuit said there is no way that deadline can be met. The deadlines “will force local canvasing boards to unconstitutionally reject” ballots that can’t be re-checked. “Because only some counties — given their size or other relevant factors — will be unable to meet the deadlines, voters will either have their vote counted during a recount or rejected based on the accident of where they reside.”
Leon Circuit Court Judge Karen Gievers on Tuesday issued an order suspending the 3 p.m. Thursday deadline for Palm Beach County to complete its machine recount of the contests for governor, agriculture commissioner and state House District 89 in southeastern Palm Beach County.
The order stemmed from a case filed by Jim Bonfiglio, a Democratic state House candidate for District 89, who trailed his GOP opponent by 37 votes.
The Palm Beach County elections office told the court because it uses older machines that can only process one race at a time in a recount, the process takes longer and won’t meet the deadline set out in state law.
If the Leon County court order stands, it would push back the entire recount process, including the likely manual recounts. The offi- cial certification of the election results, set for Nov. 20, could be pushed back to Nov. 27. But Giever’s order didn’t specify a new deadline for Bucher to complete the recount, only ordered her to move as fast as possible.
Attorneys for the Florida Department of State, however, filed to move the case to federal court. Later in a telephone news conference, Marc Elias, the lead recount lawyer for the Nelson campaign, said he believes jurisdiction in the case is moving to federal court, making any state court decision moot.
Elias, who said the Nelson campaign isn’t a part of the Bonfiglio case, said it wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the state’s voters to extend the deadline in only one county.
In Palm Beach County, Bucher said Monday that it would be “almost impossible” for her county to meet the Thursday deadline to complete recounts in all three races because of outdated laws and outdated equipment certified by the state.
She said Tuesday she has requested $11.1 million from Palm Beach County to get new voting machines that can do multiple recounts at once. She said the current machines have been in use since before she started the job in 2007.