Fla. starts hand recount in contested Senate race

TALLAHASSEE, FLA. — A hand recount began Friday in Florida’s acrimonious U.S. Senate contest after an initial review by ballot-counting machines showed Republican Gov. Rick Scott and Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson separated by fewer than 13,000 votes out of more than 8 million cast.

State law requires a hand review when the victory margin is 0.25 percentage points or less. The state’s unofficial results show Scott ahead of Nelson by 0.15 percent- age points.

The hand recount does not review all votes. It involves about 93,000 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.

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.

Broward County — which experienced numerous prob- lems throughout the election — had the most overvotes and undervotes of any Florida county — almost 31,000. At a Broward warehouse, dozens of volunteers sitting at folding tables cheered loudly when they were told they had finished the recount Friday morning and could go home for the day. Results were not immediately announced.

The contest for governor appeared all but over Thursday, with a machine recount showing Republican Ron 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 in a statement that “it is not over until every legally casted vote is counted.”

The overall recount has been fraught with problems. One large Democratic strong- hold in South Florida could not finish its machine recount by the Thursday deadline because of machines breaking down. A federal judge rejected a request to extend the recount deadline.

“We gave a heroic effort,” said Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher. If the county had three or four more hours, it would have made the deadline to recount ballots in the Senate race, she said.

Meanwhile, election officials in another urban county in the Tampa Bay area decided against turning in the results of their machine recount, which came up with 846 fewer votes than originally counted.

Broward County missed the deadline to submit its machine recount results by two minutes, but it finished its manual recount in just a few hours, which Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes attributed to the large number of volunteers assembled for the task.

Scott called on Nelson to end the recount battle.

It’s time for Nelson “to respect the will of the voters and graciously bring this process to an end rather than proceed with yet another count of the votes — which will yield the same result and bring more embarrassment to the state that we both love and have served,” the governor’s statement said.

The margin between Scott and Nelson had not changed much in the last few days, conceded Marc Elias, an attorney working for Nelson’s campaign.

JAHI CHIKWENDIU / WASHINGTON POST A Broward County, Fla., election worker shows ballots that have been damaged and duplicated to election observers. Broward finished its hand recount in the U.S. Senate race Friday.