Despite a lawsuit filed by the Bill Nelson for Senate campaign to extend the deadline for the machine recount of votes cast in the Nov 6 elections for US Senator, Florida governor and, agricultural commissioner, the recount ended at 3:00 pm on Tuesday. That is for the exception of Palm Beach County.
Beginning on Saturday, November 10, and while attracting lawsuits and court lawsuits and unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud, the recount, although the final data wasn’t confirmed by the Florida Division of Election as of press time on Thursday, not much had changed.
Preliminary recounts confirmed that Republican Ron DeSantis still leading Democrat Andre Gillum in the governor race by some 33,000 votes a margin of 0.38 percent. Since the recounted machine votes failed to reduce DeSantis’s margin to under 0.25 percent, it is likely DeSantis’ election will be confirmed.
According to Florida law, if after the machine recount a candidate is leading by less than 0.25 percent, a manual recount will be conducted.
US Senator race
The US Senator race between incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson and incumbent Florida Governor Rick Scott is heading for a manual recount, as is the race for Florida Commissioner of Agriculture. Although Nelson picked up a few hundred votes in the recount he still lags behind Scott by some 12,000 votes or 0.19 percent.
In the race for Commissioner of Agriculture, while Democrat Nikki Fried still leads Republican Matt Caldwell, her margin is only approximately 006 percent.
The manual recounts are scheduled to commence on Friday, Nov 16, and be completed on November 18.
Palm Beach County misses out
With the other 66 Florida Supervisor of Elections meeting the recount deadline, Palm Beach County’s failure to do so is most conspicuous. Even before the recount began, Palm Beach County’s Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher indicated she doubted her office would have been able to meet Thursday deadline. She said her office did not have sufficient counting machines, but would try earnestly. But on the machines, most of which were 10-years old overheated and gave incorrect totals. This made it necessary to recount the recounting 175,000 of the 585,117 votes cast o Election Day. Bucher said she “took full responsibility” for not being able to meet the deadline.
Since Palm Beach County was unable to recount the original votes stood which had Nelson winning by 16.78 percent, Gillum by 17.03 percent and Fried by 18.18 percent.
Broward County finished its recount on Thursday afternoon. Miami-Dade finished its recount by noon on Wednesday. Although the target of criticisms of incompetence, including from Florida Senator Marco Rubio, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Rick Scott, Broward Supervisor of Election and her staffed completed the recount with out hardly an itch. In an interview with the media on Tuesday, Snipes who have been Broward’s SOE since 2002 hinted that she may not seek reelection in 2020, when her current tenure ends.
On Thursday morning, a federal judge ordered Florida’s 67 elections supervisors to give thousands of voters whose ballots were rejected over mismatched signatures another two days to fix the problem and have their votes counted toward the results of the 2018 midterms. Governor Scott immediately said he would be appealing that ruling.
