Broward still counting votes
Elections supervisor doesn’t know how many ballots left
With a razor-thin margin separating Senate candidates Rick Scott and Bill Nelson, Broward County — a Democratic bastion — was still counting votes Wednesday night, with no idea how many are left.
“I can’t give you an exact number. I’m not sure. I’m really not sure,” Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes said a few hours earlier.
Broward election officials said repeatedly that they didn’t know how many mail-in ballots were still being counted.
Snipes said they would continue processing the ballots until they were finished — even if they had to stay all night.
The Senate race is too close to call and is likely heading to a recount. Scott, a Republican, had a small lead over incumbent Democrat Nelson.
In the governor’s race, Republican Ron DeSantis’ lead over Democrat Andrew Gillum narrowed to 0.58 percent as more votes were tabulated but still remained outside the margin to spur a recount as of 7 p.m. Wednesday.
Both parties had lawyers at the supervisor’s voting equipment center in Lauderhill.
Duval and Palm Beach counties had not finished counting mail-in vote results Wednesday, accord-
ing to the Florida Division of Election website. A Duval official said in the afternoon that the county had finished counting mail-in ballots. Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher did not respond to a request for comment.
Unlike Broward, those counties had reported all their early voting totals, according to the state. Snipes said Broward’s early voting totals were complete about 24 hours after the Election Day polls closed.
The Broward elections office plans to review provisional ballots at 5 p.m. Thursday and have first unofficial results by 1 p.m. Friday.
Of the Broward ballots already counted, more than 24,000 people voted for a governor candidate but didn’t vote for a Senate candidate, according to county results released Wednesday evening.
That was the largest difference in the number of voters who cast ballots for governor but chose not to pick a Senate candidate across all 67 of Florida’s counties.
The next largest differences were in Miami-Dade County, where about 1,900 more people voted for a Senate candidate than for governor, and Duval, where about 1,800 more people voted in the governor’s race than the Senate race, according to the preliminary state results.
More than 680,000 people
voted for governor in Broward in Tuesday’s election, while more than 656,000 voters cast ballots for Senate, preliminary county election results show.
The difference was nearly even between the Republican and Democratic candidates.
Gillum received more than 10,200 votes than Nelson, while DeSantis also received more than 10,200 votes than Scott.
Some voters said that they don’t remember seeing the Senate race on their ballots or that they almost missed it.
Gloria Durity, of Lauderhill, said she and her husband did not remember seeing the Senate candidates on their ballots when they voted early.
“I’m telling you it was not there,” Durity said. “I think it’s really strange.”
She said she and her husband planned to vote for Nelson.
Heather Miller, of Fort Lauderdale, doesn’t remember seeing the U.S. Senate and a U.S. House race on her vote-bymail ballot. Miller decided to vote on Election Day, when she said she could see the races on that ballot. Her mail-in ballot was voided Tuesday when she voted.
“I just hadn’t made note of the candidates that I was going to choose for the Senate and House and I had made note of all of the other candidates I was going to vote for,” she said. “And that’s why it stuck out to me.”
Snipes, who was appointed
as elections chief by then-Gov. Jeb Bush in 2003, has had a rocky tenure.
Earlier this year, a circuit court judge ruled Snipes broke federal and state law by too quickly destroying ballots from the August 2016 primaries, even though there was a pending lawsuit seeking access to those ballots.
During that August 2016 primary, early results were posted online a half-hour before polls closed, violating state law. The software provider for the online tally filed an affidavit taking responsibility for the glitch.
And before the 2016 primary, about 1,800 voters in Davie received incorrect voter ID cards. Snipes said it was due to a printing error. A judicial candidate’s name was also reported to be misspelled on early voting ballots.
For the midterms, Broward’s discrepancy among the number of votes wasn’t just in the Senate and governor races.
More people in Broward voted for the state’s commissioner of agriculture, chief financial officer and attorney general positions than they did for the Senate, according to the preliminary county results.
There is a caveat: The state data released Wednesday did not include votes for write-in candidates for Senate. In the largest counties, that could affect the differences by as many as 2,000 total votes.