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Volunteers examine the ballots during a hand-held recount in Palm Beach, Florida. The recount has decided elections for Republican candidates to the posts of senators and governors, but experts have warned that similar problems could recur in 2020 if the state does not solve them immediately.
Saul Martinez / Getty Images
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Saul Martinez / Getty Images
Volunteers examine the ballots during a hand-held recount in Palm Beach, Florida. The recount has decided elections for Republican candidates to the posts of senators and governors, but experts have warned that similar problems could recur in 2020 if the state does not solve them immediately.
Saul Martinez / Getty Images
After nearly two weeks, the darkest recurring political nightmare of the Sunshine State is over.
Florida's counting process has been marred by accusations of incompetence, outdated voting technologies and even a poll design problem that some Democrats claim would have cost them a seat in the polls. Senate. The Republicans and the President even suggested – without proof – that an election fraud had been committed.
For some, this recalled Flashback in the 2000 presidential election, when the nation's attention was drawn to Florida's humiliating and poorly organized counting procedure.
One day after the end of the count, while state governor and senate positions were listed in the GOP column, campaign counsel and election management experts discuss the counting process and what went wrong.
The worst fear that they have is that there is another election crisis in two years, when the state could play a determining role in the decision of the presidential race. .
"I was here in 2000, at the time of the last great electoral crisis, we are about to experience another electoral crisis, because I think we are asking the election officials to do too much with too little," he said. said Chris Sautter, a member of the Democratic Party. election lawyer.
Badly organized elections
The problems of 2018 involved two counties on the east coast of Florida.
"The fact that Broward and Palm Beach had problems organizing elections for a while was widely known and not addressed," said Jason Torchinsky, Republican campaign lawyer Rick Scott and electoral law expert. .
Both counties have been "the Mecca of electoral administration problems for years," he said.
Republicans and Democrats agree that one of the major problems was the election administration headed by the Broward County election supervisor, Brenda Snipes.
Snipes led an operation that, several days after the election, failed to tell the public how many outstanding ballots remained to be counted.
His office also missed a deadline to submit a two-minute machine-based recount and the new numbers were rejected because they were late. And in bewildering confusion, the Snipes office has mixed more than a dozen rejected ballots with nearly 200 valid ballots.
Snipes resigned Sunday after his county finally submitted a final vote count. His resignation comes after fifteen years of work with the electoral administrations of this region.
"The first reform is to eliminate Brenda Snipes.It's happened … it's a good reform: create a competent administration, reorganize the workings of this office," said Richard Denapoli, Republican County Broward. member of the state committee and lawyer specializing in recount issues.
Other reforms will prove more difficult. The aged voting counters of Palm Beach County, one of the richest counties in the state, posed serious recounting problems. The county said it had to restart part of the recount process after overheating the vote counting machines.
"The key lies in money, as always," joked Susan MacManus, a professor at the University of South Florida and a specialist in politics.
But she thinks that the humiliating nature of the counting controversy will force the state to devote more resources to the future election administration, so that the state no longer needs to resort to voting machines that approach the polls. age to drink in Florida.
"You have 65 angry election supervisors who have done their job very well," she told NPR. "[The election supervisors outside Palm Beach and Broward counties] have worked hard to make things better, so suddenly for them to have another black eye after working so hard has really made them angry, and you can be sure that they will be relying on lawmakers to address these issues. "
Democrats in particular will still have to shake their heads in the face of the poll design issues that cost them politically. Democrats also believe that a confusing "butterfly vote" design baffled voters in 2000, which cost them the election.
The ballot design in the Democratic Bastion of Broward County left Congress and Senate races buried to the left under the instructions of the ballot, and Democrats estimate that a significant portion of the 25,000 or so people who did not vote in these polls was baffled by formatting. Florida GOP governor Rick Scott defeated incumbent Senator Bill Nelson by about 10,000 votes.
"From the perspective of a Democratic lawyer, it is extremely frustrating to see a Democrat lose the Florida regional elections, largely because of a wrong ballot plan." This clearly had an impact on the result, "said Sautter.
Significant improvement over 2000?
But the stake was undoubtedly lower than that of the 2000 presidential election, where the occupant of the White House only had a margin of 537 votes, and a cut half full would show that the state has significantly improved since the latest major scandal.
"Florida demonstrated in 2018 that it had shortcomings in election administration, but it also illustrated the improvements Florida made in 2000," said Charles Stewart, director of the Scientific and Scientific Laboratory on the MIT elections. "There are no generalized failures on election day, and the issues that have emerged are not related to who won."
Even so, Republicans can quickly claim fraud in a race to compete this mid-term run and a president who has not fled these accusations in the past, let these issues get off the ground could cause a national crisis it was not settled in time for the next elections. .
"The time has come," said MacManus, noting that the Florida legislature would meet in January. "This has been a hindrance for the state."
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