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Uncertainty reigned over Florida's mid-term recount on Wednesday as election supervisors rushed to meet an imminent deadline and campaign lawyers struggled with election laws that could change even more. a week after the elections.
With Susan Bucher, the election supervisor at Palm Beach, she practically prayed to God to try to end a crucial recount of nearly 600,000 votes by 3 pm On Thursday's deadline, US Senator Bill Nelson's attorneys presented their own Hail Mary in a Tallahassee court in hopes of reinjecting thousands of rejected ballots into his run against Gov. Rick Scott.
Both situations cast doubt on whether and how the state will exceed a mandatory machine recount for three daunting trials across the state. A manual recount is scheduled for Thursday for two of them. It is also possible that the elections will take place under the legal control of 20 November. deadline.
"We are in prayer mode to finish at the hour," Bucher told reporters Wednesday.
US Senator Ken Detzner, governor and commissioner of agriculture, was forced to order an automatic recount in all three races on Saturday. The 67 election supervisors in Florida each have up to 15 hours. Thursday to finish their recounts and submit their new statistics to the state. Some, like Bucher, also have to recount ballot votes. If a country misses the deadline, its results on Saturday are valid.
Problems in Palm Beach County – where the old vote-counting machines overheated on Tuesday and imposed a recount of 175,000 ballots already counted – have left Bucher predicting that it will not meet the deadline. This probability underlies two ongoing federal prosecutions to extend the recount period. The lawsuits are both before US District Judge Mark Walker, who spent hours on Wednesday trying a separate legal action in Nelson's campaign to validate thousands of provisional and absentee ballots cast by overturning the polls. state process to match voter signatures.
After five litigious hours in his hearing room in Tallahassee, Walker put an end to the hearing without a decision. He indicated that he would consider giving more time to voters whose differing signatures led the solicitation councils to reject their ballots to resolve the issues. If he did, it could change the number of votes in the three races still undecided, all with margins of less than half a percentage point. It could also change the deadline for the state to have election supervisors submit their new voting totals.
The ballot rejection complaint is just one of the many actions taken by the Nelson campaign and its allies to try to reverse the vote in his favor as he outstrips Scott by more than 12,500 votes. Nelson's campaign hopes that thousands of sub-votes and over-votes – ballot papers where a machine has ruled that voters vote for either too many candidates or none – have helped reduce the number of votes cast. 39; gap. But election experts say Nelson is unlikely to move forward without successfully changing Florida's election laws to broaden the pool of votes.
"If you recount according to the rules of polling day, the results will be almost identical to those you got on polling day. The only thing that creates greater potential for effect is not just a recount process, but a simultaneous attempt to change the rules and to have the courts overturn the rules after the elections and after the election. publication of the results, "said Michael Michael. T. Morley, adjunct law professor specializing in elections at Florida State University. "Same then it may not be enough.
Walker did not seem prepared Wednesday to legislate at the hearing or allow thousands of rejected ballots to present themselves without further scrutiny. The state explained that more than 3,700 ballots had been rejected for mismatched signatures, while it concerned only the totals provided by 45 counties.
"Why in the world would I say," count them all ", regardless of whether they are valid votes?", He asked the dark suits team of lawyers from Nelson. "My grandfather would say it's more or less chasing a squirrel with a bazooka."
Walker's work is not finished. He is about to hear Thursday a lawsuit filed by a Democratic party to invalidate the methods used by the state to determine "the voter's intent" on the surplus votes and not judged. He will also consider a democratie lawsuit calling for an extension of Thursday's sitting at 3 pm deadline.
"Apparently, I'm supposed to reassess the entire Florida State Election Code, step by step. I understood it, "said Walker. "It seems like a very bad way to do that."
The lawsuits against Walker are hardly the only outstanding legal challenges. On Wednesday, Nelson filed a lawsuit against the Bay County Election Supervisor, demanding access to approximately 150 ballots sent by fax or e-mail. Scott obtained an order for the Hillsborough County Election Supervisor to allow campaign volunteers to observe the count from their room. the machines are ballot papers.
Scott had already won similar decisions in Palm Beach and Broward counties, where besieged supervisors, Bucher and Brenda Snipes, had been under fire for days for incidents, confusion and Republican accusations of election fraud. widespread. Until now, the claims have been far more prevalent than the evidence. On Wednesday, the Daily Caller published an exclusive interview with Donald Trump in which the president said without specifying that people voted, then changed again.
But for the first time, the Florida State Department has released information about possible wrongdoing in the electoral process. In a letter to the Herald / Times Tallahassee office, reported for the first time by POLITCO, Bradley McVay, the department's general counsel, asked federal prosecutors to investigate the wrong forms sent to voters. At least four counties, which might have prevented them from meeting the deadline. solve problems with their postal ballots.
The emails issued by the department show that the forms seem to have been sent by the Democratic Party of the State.
Electors from at least four counties – Broward, Citrus, Okaloosa and Santa Rosa – have received "cure affidavits" or forms used to correct postal ballot defects, such as a missing signature. or mismatched on the original ballot. But these forms indicated an incorrect due date: Thursday, November 8 instead of Monday, November 5. Election officials' e-mails in the four counties show that they received voter registration forms on November 8 that thought they still had time to vote. repair their ballots to make them count. But it was already too late.
"Please, tell the FDP that he can not arbitrarily add his own deadline to your VBM form." [vote-by-mail] cures! ", Wrote Paul Lux, Okaloosa County election supervisor, in an email. "It's crazy !!"
The state sent four sworn statements of electors to federal prosecutors, all of whom belonged to Democrats. Scott's campaign, however, quickly raised the question of whether there was already a ploy: the influx of Democratic voters trying to vote after the deadline could make it easier for Democrats and Liberal groups to play with voters. legal process and finally struggle to change the law – just as they do right now. "
Scott himself was not in the turmoil of the day. As his campaign and his lawyers fought before judges and boards of directors, the Florida governor spent the day in Washington with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other newly elected senators. even if his election is still uncertain.
Which is no longer doubtful: if Scott will commit to certifying the results of his own election. On Wednesday, his lawyer, Daniel Nordby, said Scott would leave his position on the Florida election commission, which, according to the law, should certify the results of the November 20 elections.
Scott's role in this process has been the subject of another lawsuit by the Women's Union and Common Cause League aimed at preventing the governor – who has twice called for the intervention of the state police in the counting of South Florida ballots – to play a formal role in the supervision of the president tell. The lawsuit is one of nearly a dozen related to recounting so far.
Morley, an Electoral Law Professor, said the potentially insurmountable gap between Scott and Nelson could be the reason for the multitude of lawsuits.
"Each of these prosecutions only affects a certain number of ballots," he said. "To the best of my knowledge, it looks like [Nelson] The board of directors and the courts should override several provisions of Florida law in order to have enough ballots in play to change the outcome. "
But for now, simply knowing the result of the recount seems quite difficult.
Most of Florida's 67 counties completed their automatic recount, but most major counties were hoping to finish their work on Wednesday or Thursday morning. Only Bucher in Palm Beach should miss the deadline.
Bucher told reporters that his staff had been working all Wednesday night to tell about 175,000 advance votes. The county called on technicians to repair the machines on Tuesday, and Bucher said the equipment had worked well overnight. But unlike the ballot counters in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, where election officials expect elections to end on time, Palm Beach ballot counters can only tell one race at a time.
The Democratic nominee for the House of Representatives, Jim Bonfiglio, filed a lawsuit on Monday to extend the counting deadline for Palm Beach County after losing 37 votes against a Republican candidate. The case was referred to federal court on Tuesday and was still pending Wednesday afternoon.
Bucher said that for now, her deadline was still November 15 at 3 pm, which she described as "unreasonable".
"We are trying to meet a deadline that really should not be there," she said.
In Broward, Snipes staff said it expects to have more than 700,000 ballots counted by around five o'clock on Thursday.
The Snipes office started late because of problems with the calibration of its machines and the large number of ballots that had to be split in order to recount. Broward County officials say the department's high-speed tabulators have the capacity to process 68,000 ballots an hour with machines running at their optimum capacity, allowing the county to complete its recount.
But Snipes continues to have problems disperse information.
Snipes' lawyers told the press this weekend that his office had submitted a pile of 205 provisional ballots as part of Broward's unofficial counting of Saturday's votes in the state. But Snipes broadcast CNN late Tuesday night and said it was not.
"They have never been counted," she told CNN host Chris Cuomo. "These bulletins had been separated, they were isolated. They have not been counted so far.
What is true? This is about as difficult to determine as how Judge Walker will rule Thursday on the various lawsuits that have been presented to him and whether Florida will meet its recount deadlines.
Tampa Bay Times reporter Kirby Wilson, journalist Herald / Times Tallahassee Bureau, Alex Daugherty and Caitlin Ostroff, McClatchy journalists, and Sarah Blaskey, Miami Herald journalists Joey Flechas, Alex Harris and Martin Vassolo, contributed to the realization of this article.
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