Florida braces for statewide HAND recount of more than 8 million Senate ballots after machine-recount ends in farce because overheated machines and disappearing votes made two counties give up
- Aging machines that count Florida ballots overheated in Palm Beach County
- Power outages made votes disappear in Hillsborough County’s machine recount
- Democrats trying to close gap in tight races asked judge to extend deadline
- State law prohibited any leeway; Palm Beach County’s recount never finished
- Election supervisor Susan Bucher: ‘We gave it a heroic effort. We were timed out’
- Democrat Bill Nelson has refused to concede Senate seat to Gov. Rick Scott
- Scott gained votes in the machine recount but the gap is still less than 0.25%
- That means the whole state will count everything again by hand
Florida election workers will recount more than 8 million ballots cast last week in a hotly contested U.S. Senate race, facing a Sunday deadline to get the work done under the watchful eyes of both Republican and Democratic partisans.
Two counties abandoned their efforts to machine-recount last week’s election ballots on Thursday, after a legally mandated deadline came and went and a federal judge called the state’s famous electoral ineptness a global ‘laughingstock.’
In Palm Beach County, aging machines that can only count one race’s votes at a time sputtered and overheated.
Four separate elections there ended with a margin of less than 0.5 per cent of the more than 8 million votes cast, including contests for governor, U.S. Senate, state agriculture commissioner and a seat in the state legislature. All but the governor’s race are still in doubt.
Election supervisor Susan Bucher told reporters: ‘We gave it a heroic effort. We were timed out.’
In Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, election officials were left red-faced when their completed recount showed 846 fewer votes than it tallied the first time.
Palm Beach County Supervisor Of Elections Susan Bucher gave up on a machine recount of ballots cast in the statewide U.S. Senate race last week after machines overheated and broke down, making it impossible to meet a legal deadline at 3:00 p.m. Thursday
Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson appears to have lost his seat by less than 14,000 votes after 65 of Florida’s 67 counties recounted their portions of more than 8 million ballots cast Nov. 6
Florida Gov. Rick Scott, now apparently a U.S. senator-elect, went to Washington on Wednesday to participate in orientation activities on Capitol Hill
Tables are set up for hand-counting ballots in Palm Beach County, ready for election workers to engage in the same kind of work that deterined the 2000 U.S. presidential race
Both counties reverted to the unofficial results they submitted to the Florida secretary of state on Saturday, voiding their machine recounts entirely.
Gov. Rick Scott, the Republican who ran for Democrat Bill Nelson’s seat in the U.S. Senate, claimed victory a second time after the statewide recount showed his edge grew by 865 votes, to a total of 13,427 votes.
But that’s still less than a 0.25 per cent difference, so state law requires all of the Sunshine State’s 67 counties to start over again – this time turning off the machines and recounting that contest’s votes by hand.
Until that process is over, the second set of results are just as ‘unofficial’ as the first.
That hasn’t stopped Scott from presuming he holds the title ‘senator-elect.’
He showed up in Washington on Wednesday to participate in orientation for new members, along with other GOP election winners.
‘Last week, Florida voters elected me as their next U.S. senator and now the ballots have been counted twice,’ he said in a statement.
Volunteers gathered in Palm Beach County to go over the manual counting process before starting on Thursday after officials failed to meet a deadline for machine-recounting
Every one of Florida’s 67 counties (Miami-Dade County officials are pictured) had a machine recount and will now have to start over by hand because the margin in the U.S. Senate race is tighter than 0.25 per cent
B allot counting machines overheated and broke down in Palm Beach County; they weren’t designed to count more than one race at a time
‘Our state needs to move forward. We need to put this election behind us, and it is time for Bill 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.’
That embarrassment was front-and-center hours earlier when U.S. District Judge Mark Walker upbraided Palm Beach County officials, saying they should have made sure they had enough equipment in place to handle a multi-contest recount.
‘We have been the laughingstock of the world, election after election,’ Walker marveled. ‘And we chose not to fix this.’
Walker also said about 4,000 voters whose signatures on mali-in ballots didn’t match those on file with the government could have until Saturday at 5:00 p.m. to resolve the differences and have their ballots counted.
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals refused to intervene Thursday afternoon.
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On Tuesday President Donald Trump called on Nelson to admit he lost his re-election bid to Scott. He implied, without evidence, that officials in two large counties were trying to steal the election.
‘When will Bill Nelson concede in Florida?’ Trump wrote. ‘The characters running Broward and Palm Beach voting will not be able to ‘find’ enough votes, too much spotlight on them now!’
Both counties are Democratic strongholds.
The statewide hand recount of votes in the Senate race is subject to a Sunday deadline. Lawyers for Nelson, led by former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias, have said they will go back to court to ask again for a deadline extension.
Elias told reporters on Tuesday that there’s no need to rush, since the next U.S. Congress doesn’t begin until January.
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