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The races of the Governor, the US Senate and the Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services are tight – even for Florida.
But are they so close that a recount can change the outcome?
The story almost certainly says no.
At the closing date of the report, Saturday, about 12,500 votes separated Republican Gov. Rick Scott and Democratic Senator Bill Nelson in the most controversial of the three upcoming recount battles. Former Republican Congressman Ron DeSantis led Democrat Andrew Gillum in the run for the governor by about 34,000 votes. Democrat Nikki Fried got a lead of 5,300 votes over Republican Matt Caldwell in the race for the Commissioner of Agriculture.
Florida law states that any election decided at 0.5% or less must be recounted. The three races correspond to this invoice.
Yet the three candidates who appeared to be running their races – Scott, DeSantis and Fried – declared the victory.
They may not be premature.
Math says Caldwell probably has the best chance of reversing his fortune in a recount. In addition, it could also receive a bump of thousands of Republican – style overseas votes that have not yet been counted.
During the race in the Senate, Nelson's lawyer, Marc Elias, said he was also expecting Nelson's losing margin to be cleared by a recount.
"If I had to place a bet, it is more than likely that Senator Nelson will take it into a recount," Elias said during a conference call with reporters on Friday.
But a recount that would reverse an initial margin of more than a few hundred votes would be unprecedented in the recent history of US elections. According to an analysis by the non-partisan FairVote group, which advocates electoral reforms to facilitate voting, out of 2,687 elections nationwide between 2000 and 2016, only 26 were recounted. Of these 26, only three reports changed the initial race outcome: The 2004 Washington Governor's Race, the 2006 Vermont State Auditor's Race and the 2008 US Senate of Minnesota Race. average swing in these three elections after the recounts? About 311 votes.
In none of these cases was a general vote counting error discovered that ultimately tipped the election.
"I think the story of the story revealed that, overall, the errors unearthed are innocent mistakes and that they somehow balance," said Charles Stewart III, a science professor. at MIT.
For example, during the 2008 US Senate race in Minnesota, the final result was based in part on a few hundred ballot papers that the courts had judged had been wrongly excluded from the original result. The votes for Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman were discovered during a manual recount. (Fun fact: Elias also represented the Democrat in this race.)
Florida has many more voters than Minnesota, Vermont or Washington. More than a few hundred votes could be transferred during a count in Florida, although a series of small random errors explains this change. Even if this happens, it is still unlikely that enough votes will be found to change the outcome of any of the three races, according to FairVote's analysis.
"With a wider electorate, it is less likely that a change of vote will be important enough to affect the final outcome of the elections," says the August 2018 report.
To summarize, Nelson – and to a greater extent Gillum – would need a systematic error in their recounts if we wanted to reverse the results.
Nelson's lawyers say that's exactly what they're betting on: the senator's way to being re-elected resides in a number of potentially bickering inferotes in Nelson in Broward County.
At Broward, some 25,000 voters voted in the race for the governor's race without taking into account the race in the US Senate, an unusually high number compared to other counties. Elias said Nelson's campaign thought the gap could be attributed to a tabulation error. Once this error was corrected in the recount, Elias said that Nelson would probably get the majority of votes needed to overtake Scott.
But several factors run counter to Elias's theory. First of all, even if each of these 25,000 disadvantaged voters is discovered in a recount and given to Nelson at 69%, he will win the vote in Broward, the senator would still have 4,800 votes less than Scott. On the other hand, voting machines simply do not often make mistakes of this magnitude, according to experts.
"I do not know why the tabulators would miss this race and pick up all the others," said Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
More likely, Burden said, a bad ballot design is causing Nelson's problems at Broward. Examples of Broward County ballot papers show that the race in the US Senate was placed in the lower left corner of the ballot, just below the voting instructions. Voters may have simply neglected the competition.
Stewart stated that he found that Broward's under-voting rate was about the same for advance polls, postal voting and voting on polling day – which would seem to suggest that the under-vote should be assigned to humans, not to machines.
"Machines are very effective at counting ballots," Stewart said.
If Nelson faces a difficult battle in his recount, Gillum's chances of eliminating his deficit are even longer. A margin of about 0.41% separates it from DeSantis, so it is unlikely that an initial recount will reduce it to a margin of 0.25% for a second manual recount. Although Gillum canceled its initial deal at a press conference on Saturday, DeSantis began its transition plans.
Gillum himself seemed to recognize his chances.
"I'm replacing my concession words with an uncompromising and apologetic call that we count every vote," Gillum said. "I say that recognizing my destiny in that may or may not change."
Editors Herald / Times Tallahassee, Steve Bousquet and Elizabeth Koh, contributed to this report.
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