Probable stories in the governor's, senate's races

By Michael Sherer | Washington Post

Nearly two decades after the clash of power, Florida is heading back to a high-stakes electoral recount, while voting margins have dwindled in favor of Democrats on Thursday in the United States marquee and governor.

Hundreds of party volunteers and interest groups spent the day trying to track down people who had voted on an interim basis, looking for affidavits that would prove their votes should be counted. And in an echo to the 2000 presidential election, Republicans tried to prevent the upcoming bout by accusing Democratic lawyers of traveling to Broward County to "steal" the elections.

In the Senate race, Gov. Rick Scott, R, had a lead of just over 17,000 votes, or 0.22 percent, on Sen. Bill Nelson, D, on Thursday afternoon. In the race for the governor, Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum was ahead of former representative Ron DeSantis, R, with less than 39,000 votes, or 0.47%.

Under Florida law, an automatic state-wide recount is performed when the margin of victory is less than 0.5% and a manual recount is ordered if the margin is less than 0.25%.

The likely stories, however, should be more orderly than the televised circus that led to the election of George W. Bush as president. Under changes in state law, local soliciting councils no longer have the power to order a recount. New optical voting voting machines make it easier to guess the voter's intent than the old punch card ballots, which sometimes had partially detached pieces. paper.

Preparations for the recount are taking place as court challenges have added suspense to races in two other key states. Four Arizona Republican Republican parties filed a lawsuit on Wednesday to prevent county registrars from trying to verify signatures after the polls closed for mail-in voting. a race in the US Senate in which representative Kyrsten Sinema, D, was ahead of representative Martha McSally, R, Thursday night.

In Georgia, Democratic presidential candidate Stacey Abrams, who is hoping to start a second round with Republican Brian Kemp, has filed a federal lawsuit to allow counting of ballots received before the close of business on Friday. Kemp oversaw the election as Georgian secretary of state before resigning from his post on Thursday.

Common Cause, a human rights group, is asking for emergency assistance that will give them more time to investigate all the provisional polls. The group also wants a federal judge to order Georgia to count all the provisional votes, unless the state proves that an elector was not eligible or did not go to court. was not registered in time.

A second round would be called in Georgia if neither candidate exceeds 50% of the vote. Thursday evening, Kemp rose to 50.33% and Abrams to 48.7%.

Campaigns for Nelson and Gillum in Florida have become more optimistic in recent days, as the number of newly counted votes in Broward County has increased their total. They warned the state that they planned to aggressively monitor any recounts.

"We think that in the end, Senator Nelson will be declared the winner and will return to the US Senate," said Marc Elias, Election Attorney representing Nelson's campaign, during a conference call Thursday morning. "I think it's fair to say now that the results of the 2018 Senate elections are unknown."

State Republicans immediately attacked Elias, Scott's campaign calling him "a gun rented from Washington, DC".

"Let's be clear: when Elias says" win ", he means" steal, "wrote the Scott campaign in an e-mail to reporters right after the call.

The other state senator, Republican Marco Rubio, also accused the Nelson team of trying to "steal" the elections.

"Now the Democratic lawyers are coming down on #Florida. They have been very clear, they are not here to make sure every vote is counted, "added Rubio in a series of tweets. "They are here to change the election results. & #Broward is where they plan to do it. "

Later in the day, Ronna McDaniel, president of the Republican National Committee, attacked the local election supervisor for the time it took Broward to count the votes.

"What's happening in Florida is unacceptable," McDaniel wrote. "#Broward's election supervisor has been doing stunts like this for years and we will not let her go."

The stakes were obvious when the Gillum campaign, in a rare exercise of American politics, deviated from the concession made on election night by the candidate.

"Tuesday night, the Gillum campaign for governors worked with the best information available on the number of outstanding ballots remaining to count," Gillum spokeswoman Johanna Cervone said in a statement. "Since that time, it has become apparent that there are many more unnumbered ballots than what was originally announced."

Elias said during the call that Democrats tend to win votes between their accounts. "It's a jump ball," he said of the race in the Senate.

The postponement of voting in Broward County, with a democratic tendency, the epicenter of the vote count dispute in the 2000 presidential election, added suspense to the uncertainty.

Democrats have expressed concerns about the design of the ballot in Broward County, which has sometimes exceeded 10 pages. They argued that this could have contributed to a voting rate of less than 20,000 for the Senate race, compared to the governor's race.

On the first page of the ballot, the race in the Senate was at the bottom of the page, under voting instructions, while the governor's race was listed in a separate column to the right of the instructions.

Lawrence Norden, who studied voting technology at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the design could have contributed to Broward's higher rate of inferotes for the Senate race. "No other county has this high rate of sub-votes," he said.

Others suggested that the reason for the under-assignment was perhaps more complex than a simple misconception.

"I do not think that's the only reason for undervaluation. That could have helped, "said Broward County Democratic President Cynthia Busch. "I think there is also a problem of information of voters in a county area."

She said some parts of the county where the party spent less money to inform the voters of the vote had higher under-voting rates.

Barry Richard, Gillum's lawyer who represented George W. Bush in the 2000 recount, said it was still too early to know where the final vote would end.

"It's still a moving target," he said.

Election supervisors have until Saturday Saturday to complete their initial count, which will determine whether a recount will be ordered.

This delay forced the democrats to demolish Thursday to resolve issues regarding the provisional polls cast on polling day. In some cases, voters have been contacted for the purpose of obtaining affidavits with identity papers proving their identity.

Marji Sachs, a lawyer in Weston, Florida, volunteered to release the provisional ballots. "It happened very quickly and it was a semi-organized chaos," she said.

Jeff Greene, chairman of the Broward Democratic Party's communications party, said the party's lawyers had pointed out several specific problems that hopefully would be solved in a recount.

He said that there had been about 10,000 ballots in Palm Beach County with misplaced marks that could have ejected the machines. In Miami-Dade County, he said, the number of mail ballots for unmatched signatures was rejected, which is well above normal rates.