A machine recount of the Florida governor and Senate races in an embattled county won’t count because election officials missed a deadline for submitting the results by two minutes — all but sealing victory for the GOP gubernatorial candidate.
Broward County officials uploaded the results of their recount two minutes past Florida’s 3 p.m. deadline Thursday. The state will now use the unofficial results that were submitted by the county on Saturday.
Broward County election worker Joe D’Alessandro told NBC Miami that the results were submitted past the deadline because of his “unfamiliarity with the website” used to upload the results.
“We uploaded to the state two minutes late so the state has chosen not to use our machine recount results and they are going to use the first unofficial results as our second unofficial results,” D’Alessandro told the news station.
The decision is likely to anger Florida Democrats, whose candidates were trailing in both the Senate and governor races.
The missed deadline likely doomed Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum’s chances because he trails Republican candidate Ron DeSantis by 0.41 percent. That margin is above the 0.25 percentage that would mandate a hand recount.
The Senate race, however, falls in the margin that requires a the hand recount. Democrat incumbent Bill Nelson trails Republican Rick Scott by 0.14 percentage points.
The hand recount in the Senate race is likely to stretch into this weekend.
But that hasn’t stopped Scott, the former governor of Florida, from declaring victory — and appearing in a photo op in Washington for newly elected GOP senators.
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