Broward County meets the final deadline
Broward elections officials met their noon deadline Sunday, submitting their final election tallies to the state with 52 minutes to spare. Palm Beach County delivered its final tally in the nick of time, just one second before noon.
Broward’s Canvassing Board adjourned to loud applause at 11:08 a.m. after being told they were done for the day.
A crowd of reporters waited nearby for Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes to give a comment.
“Bye guys!” she said with a broad smile, waving to the dozen or so journalists standing just a few feet away.
Broward’s ballot recount hit a snag Saturday, with Snipes saying 2,040 ballots had been either misplaced, misfiled or mixed in with
another stack.
Those ballots did not get counted in the machine recount completed on Thursday.
“It’s a big operation but there are some things that need to be tweaked,” Snipes told a reporter who asked what lessons she has learned from this year’s bumpy recount.
On Sunday, Snipes said the missing ballots had gotten “intermingled” with the first page during the sorting phase of the recount.
“I never thought the ballots were missing,” she said. A day earlier, she insisted the ballots had to be somewhere in the building.
The missing ballots had no impact on the outcome of the election because the Canvassing Board agreed to use the original tally of 714,859 votes from Election Day, Snipes said.
“We used the first unofficial count [from Election Day] so those votes have been counted,” she said.
More than 8.19 million votes were cast statewide on Election Day.
A hand recount showed Republican Gov. Rick Scott beating incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson by a lead of 10,033 votes on Sunday.
Nelson, first elected to the Senate in 2000, conceded the race Sunday in a phone call to Scott.
“I was not victorious in this race but I still wish to strongly re-affirm the cause for which we fought: A public office is a public trust,” Nelson said, promising to continue to fight for what’s right and to encourage opposing sides to reach across the aisle.
“Inevitably, at times, that effort will fall short,” he said. “But we have to try. We have to move beyond a politics that aims not just to defeat but to destroy; where
truth is treated as disposable, where falsehoods abound, and the free press is assaulted as the ‘enemy of the people.’”
In the race for agriculture commissioner, Democrat Nikki Fried had a 6,753-vote lead over Republican Matt Caldwell after the hand recount, an increase over her earlier 5,037-vote lead.
Florida’s heated race for governor came to an end Saturday night when Democrat Andrew Gillum conceded to DeSantis, who won by 33,683 votes.
Official election results are scheduled to be certified at 9 a.m. Tuesday.
On Sunday morning, Broward’s three-member Canvassing Board made it quite clear they had no intention of missing their noon deadline.
“We are under a deadline with the state of Florida and we need to get these results up there,” said Broward County Judge Betsy Benson, a member of the board. “We’re ready to go. I don’t want to be late with Tallahassee.”
The elections office submitted Broward’s recount totals to the state on Thursday, but the state rejected them because they were submitted two minutes late.
In Palm Beach County, election officials barely made the noon deadline, with just one second to spare. They uploaded their recount at 11:59:59 a.m.
Workers started re-tallying over votes and under votes by hand around 10 a.m. after getting a six-hour break from a near allnighter the day before.
In the end, Republican Mike Caruso defeated his Democratic opponent Jim Bonfiglio Sunday after Palm Beach County’s second recounting of the race.
What started as a 126-vote lead after Election Day on Nov. 6 triggered the recount.
The initial machine recount narrowed the razor-thin lead: Caruso, an accountant, edged Bonfiglio by 37 votes. The figure was unchanged after volunteers checked the ballots by hand.
“We won on Election Day, and we won here today,” Caruso said. “I think the process surely played out and it [proved] to work."
Florida’s House District 89 includes most of Boca Raton and Delray Beach east of Florida’s Turnpike. With a near equal makeup of registered Democrats and Republicans, the race was largely considered a toss-up.
Caruso will replace Rep. Bill Hager, R-Boca Raton, who is term-limited.
Minutes after getting the news, Caruso said he planned to head to Tallahassee on Sunday, two days before his swearing-in ceremony on Tuesday. He said his first order of business will be to fix the elections process.
“The number one thing I want to do is go up there and work on this process to make sure that it’s more efficient, it’s more accurate and it’s more transparent,” Caruso said.
Even though the deadline passed, Palm Beach County election workers still will have to finish counting some votes for agricultural commissioner, which the Canvassing Board did not complete.
State law requires canvassing boards to complete the recounts even if the deadline is not met. Meanwhile, the initial results have to be submitted in their place, along with an explanation of why the recount was not completed.
In Broward, the race for West Park’s Commission Seat 1 was also close enough to require a manual recount.
Anthony Dorsett was leading the race by just six votes over Katrina Touchstone on Election Day.
In the hand recount, Touchstone picked up three more votes and Dorsett picked up one — making Dorsett the winner by four votes.