Hotly-contested Florida Senate race could be bound for a hand recount

Florida concluded the first phase of a tumultuous recount of its midterm election on Thursday, with the latest results appearing to show that the hotly contested race for the Senate was still so close it would have to go to a manual recount.

State senator did not immediately postpone the ballot counts, but Florida's governor, Rick Scott, who is leaving office, said he had expanded his lead over the incumbent Democratic senator, Bill Nelson, by an additional 865 votes, to a total of 13,427 votes .

Though that gap would still be needed to recount – Scott called on Nelson to concede.

"Last week, Florida voters elected me their next U.S. senator and now the ballots have been counted twice," Scott said in a statement. "Our state needs to move forward. We need to make this election, and it is time for Bill Nelson to respect the will of the voters and to make it happen, rather than proceed with another vote of the votes – which will yield the same result, and bring more embarrbadment to the state that we both love and have served. "

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No, Ron DeSantis, the former Republican congressman, held a narrow lead over the mayor of Tallahbadee, Andrew Gillum, at Democrat.

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As of the 3 p.m. deadline for a recount of three close state of the contests, nearly all of Florida's 67 counties – with the exception of Palm Beach and Hillsborough counties – were on track to report updated results.

The machine recounts that began over the weekend ran into significant problems in Palm Beach County. Authorities said the tabulation equipment came up in the final Senate tally, making it impossible for the county to meet the Thursday deadline.

The initial phase of the recession was about which lawsuits would be counted and what deadlines would apply. A federal judge ruled early Thursday that those whose ballots were rejected because of mismatched signatures should be given to rectify their ballots.

With Palm Beach County unable to produce a final tally in time. Judge Mark E. Walker of the U.S. Court District in Tallahbadee Asked a question of the courts to answer the question: Would it be legal to proceed with recount results that are missing one county?

"Mohammad Omar Jazil, a lawyer for the Florida secretary of state, told the court," There is no right to have your vote counted at second time or a third time.

The problem in Palm Beach County is with an antiquated vote-counting machines that do not allow multiple races to be counted simultaneously. The county had a priority on recounting the Senate race, which was listed first on the ballot.

One reason for Palm Beach's time was its tabulation machines overheating this week, creating 200,000 votes again. An additional problem surfaced later, according to the Palm Beach County elections supervisor, Susan Bucher: After the mechanical failure was corrected and the machines were restarted, they apparently failed to tabulate whole boxes of votes – the totals now do not add up, Bucher said .

Bucher would not say exactly how many boxes are missing from the count.

"A little bit more than a dozen precincts lost substantial numbers," she said.

Were made to look at the numbers of the ballots in the box, which of them could be put into the machine again, she said .

Despite all the problems, most election workers in Palm Beach County did not show up for work until about 10 a.m. on Thursday. Bucher defended her decision to let her exhausted staff go home at 9 p.m. to sleep and eat. Thursday morning to try to solve the machine malfunctions, she said.

"You can not just have this run," she said. "You can not do this kind of work with no rest, you just can not."

Separately, Walker ruled early Thursday that Florida's law that permits the election of voters to reject vote-by-mail and provisional ballots because voters' signatures do not match the ones on file threatens to unconstitutionally disenfranchise thousands of voters. His order of the day was marked by the signing of the March 5 issue. The new deadline would apply to a number of just over 4,000 voters who were notified late that their mail-in ballots had been rejected because of a signature mismatch. Those voters will confirm their identities.

There are dozens of reasons for signature, even when the individual is signing up for the vote, "the judge wrote. "What this case comes down to is that without procedural safeguards, the use of signature matching is not reasonable and may lead to unconstitutional disenfranchisement."

Scott's campaign said it was filing an immediate appeal. They pointed out that it was a very small group of people – it was not clear how many – who had received late notifications about their rejected signatures.

"We are immediately appealing this baseless decision and we are confident we will prevail in the 11th Circuit," spokeswoman for the Scott campaign, Lauren Schenone, said in a statement.

Although the ballots were split between parties, they were disproportionately affected young voters. Daniel A. Smith, an expert at the University of Florida, said 26 per cent of the ballots for the 30-member vote, but it is still a question of whether or not to vote.

Smith's tabulations show the number of ballots rejected for signature or other user error problems at 10,000, more than double the preliminary figures provided to the federal court.

"Howard Simon, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, said this year that it was commissioned to conduct a study on various problems with mail-in voting.

The Scott campaign a separate legal bid in Broward County, where lawyers asked a question about the counting ballots that had not been counted in time for Saturday.

"Said Myrna Perez, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice, which represented the League of Women Voters and Common Cause in Successful Contestants. that case.

Nelson filed a follow-up on Thursday, this one challenging the decision by an election supervisor in hurricane-damaged Bay County to accept a handful of ballots that had been submitted by fax and e-mail.