The strange vote that could cost the race to Senator Nelson

Broward County, just north of Miami, has nearly 2 million residents, making it one of the largest counties in America. For Democrats, it is also a voice producing behemoth, representing more than 10% of all votes they receive across the state. Not surprisingly, based on the ballots cast since Broward until now, Nelson crushes his Republican opponent Rick Scott by 69% to 31%.

But that's where the question comes in. While many votes were cast in Broward for the Senate race, many more votes were cast in this county in the race for governorship. Saturday, the gap was around 26,000.

That means that out of about 26,000 votes, voters have registered their choice in the race for the governor's bid, which pitted Democrat Andrew Gillum against Republican Ron DeSantis, but not in the Senate. This represents about 3.7% of the votes cast at Broward. To put it mildly, this number is radically superior to anything found in any of Florida's other 66 counties, where the votes cast in the Senate and the governorship elections have evolved equally.

Clearly, something is happening at Broward – but what? Nelson campaign lawyer Marc Elias suggests that there is a machine problem that results in Senate ballot votes not being recorded from ballots. Broward's election supervisor, Brenda Snipes, insists that there is no technical problem. If there is one, the recount will probably catch up with it.

But the other possibility here is one that will evoke unpleasant memories long suppressed for older Democrats: did the design of Broward's ballot miss a few voters critical of the race for Senate?

There is convincing evidence for this theory. A glance at Broward's ballot shows that the Senate race occupies an isolated corner, buried in the left column under long instructions. The governor's race, meanwhile, is perched high at the top of the middle column, with a large spacing between the names of the six qualified candidates. There is no doubt where the eye is more easily drawn.

Then there is this: on the Broward ballot, the Senate race is paired in the lower left column with another contest for the House. Broward contains elements from four congressional districts – all democratically preserved – so that voters from different parts of the county voted on different electoral lists. But in one of those districts, the 24th congressional district of Rep. Frederica Wilson, there was apparently no race in the House. Wilson did not oppose any opposition and Florida law stipulated that the race would simply not appear on the ballot in such a case, the only candidate being simply considered the winner.

And, as political cartographer Matthew Isbell discovered, in the small part of Broward County that is part of the 24th arrondissement, the number of ballots without a vote in the Senate has exploded. Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Survey Institute, also reviewed the results in the neighboring constituencies of the county and found that the number of non-votes in senatorial elections was significantly higher than the national average, especially in the 24th district.

These results strongly suggest that a small portion of Broward's voters simply missed the race in the Senate. The consequences could be huge.

If most of those 26,000 people had voted in the Senate race, and if they had done it at the rate of 69 to 31 percent for Nelson seen throughout the county, Nelson would have won a plurality of around 8,000 of them. Scott is leading with approximately 12,000 votes at the time of writing, but if the final statewide margin was reduced to less than 8,000 votes after the recount, the Broward ballot could have been make the difference.

It is a trauma that the Democrats of Florida and all over the country know all too well.

In 2000, when George W. Bush won the presidency with an official margin of victory of 537 votes in Florida, it was the vote of another giant and strongly Democratic county that had helped to condemn the Democrats. Then the culprit was Palm Beach County and its infamous "butterfly ballot", which created widespread confusion and a fatal anomaly. Pat Buchanan has received nearly four times more votes in Palm Beach than in any other Florida county. Even Buchanan will later say that he believed that the majority of those 3,111 votes went to Al Gore.

There were of course other factors at play in Florida in 2000. Democrats argue that a recount under certain conditions would have given the state to Al Gore, while Republicans insist that the network calls at an early stage Gore – when polls were still open in the highly Republican Panhandle region – discouraged Bush voters being forced to return home without having to vote. It is impossible to identify a factor that makes all the difference.

But it is also impossible for Democrats to forget that the Palm Beach ballot, just like this year's Broward ballot, is also likely to remain etched in their memory.