■ Trump says Snipes should be fired.

As Florida’s statewide election recount continued Wednesday, President Donald Trump said embattled Broward elections supervisor Brenda Snipes should be fired.

“Oh, she should have been removed — I think she should have been removed in the middle of this mix-up,” Trump said in an interview with conservative website The Daily Caller when asked about Snipes.

When asked by The Daily Caller how to prevent a repeat situation in 2020, the president said: “First thing you do is fire her and her cronies. You get ’em out.”

Trump’s comments came as Palm Beach County election officials said they’re not sure they can meet Thursday’s 3 p.m. recount deadline and Broward officials said they were on track to finish the machine recount on time.

There were speeches and protests in front of both counties’ elections offices Wednesday morning, in addition to a number of court suits, as Democrats and Republicans tried to gain the upper hand in recounts that will determine the state’s next governor, senator and agriculture commissioner.

“We are looking to be completed sometime early in the morning [Thursday],” said Broward County Elections Planning and Development Director Joe D'Alessandro.

By late afternoon, Broward had completed the recount of early votes, mail-in ballots were “60 to 65 percent” complete and the elections office still had to count the more than 200,000 ballots that were cast in-person on election day, he said.

The office said some 80 ballots now have tears in them and will have to be duplicated so they can be fed into the vote-counting machines. It’s unknown whether those tears occurred prior to the initial election or after, so those ballots’ effect on the recount total is unknown as well.

D’Alessandro said the office was on schedule to begin hand recounts at 6 a.m. Friday. That recount, which will include both the U.S. Senate race and the agriculture commissioner race but not the governor’s race — assuming the margins of victory in the machine recount are comparable to what they were in the election — must be completed by Sunday, but includes only ballots that the machines could not read. That includes those in which the machine did not read a vote, and those in which it read more than one vote in a race.

In Palm Beach County, Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher said she and her staff were doing “everything in their power” to finish the recount by 3 p.m. Thursday.

Yet she remained concerned they’d fail to finish recounting 600,000 ballots by the state’s deadline, which she referred to as unreasonable.

Bucher’s efforts were dealt a setback when the county’s machines overheated Tuesday night. That mishap meant an estimated 175,000 recounted ballots had to be recounted again.

She defended herself against critics who have accused her of incompetence over how long the recount is taking and said her staff is working around the clock.

“I have a staff that I would go to war with, and I don’t think anybody’s going to assemble a better team than I’ve assembled here,” she said.

Miami-Dade County completed its machine recount on Tuesday and was conducting quality assurance tests on Wednesday. Officials said the county’s numbers would be reported to the state by the deadline.

Terrie Rizzo, head of the Florida Democratic Party, was at the Palm Beach County site, defending the need for an extension of time for the machine recounts.

“The deadline now is arbitrary and should be extended,” Rizzo said. “Any claims of fraud are baseless. Let the votes fall where they are and let every vote be counted.”

It’s not just the statewide races that are being recounted. Four local races in Broward and a state representative race in Palm Beach County also had leading candidates within a half-percentage point of each other, which requires a mandatory recount under state law.

Jim Bonfiglio, the Democratic candidate for Florida House District 89 — which includes most of coastal Palm Beach County — is running slightly behind Republican candidate Mike Caruso — by 37 votes on the state election site and by 124 on the county’s site. The state site shows 557 more votes cast in the race than the Palm Beach County site.

Bonfiglio filed a lawsuit Monday in the state’s 2nd Judicial Circuit demanding an immediate recount. Secretary of State Ken Detzner, who was listed as a defendant in the suit, argues the lawsuit belongs in federal court.

On Wednesday, Bonfiglio showed up at the warehouse in Riviera Beach and accused the secretary of state of shopping for a new judge by getting the case moved to federal court.

“They’re playing politics,” he said. “And

I’m very upset for the electors.”

At the Broward Supervisor of Elections Office in Lauderhill, Democrats, including party officials and labor union members who had gathered for morning news conference, were countered by a group of Republicans holding signs reading “Voting Abyss” and “Brenda Swipes.”