Broward County Misses Machine Recount Deadline by 2 Minutes as Hand Recount Starts

Broward County missed the Thursday 3 p.m. deadline for machine recount results by two minutes, initially appearing to cost Republican Gov. Rick Scott nearly 800 votes in his bid for a Senate seat.

The missed deadline came just hours after Brenda Snipes, the county’s supervisor of elections, who has violated the state’s Constitution and illegally mixed in rejected ballots with good ballots, bragged that she never missed a deadline.

The machine recount resulted in a net gain for Scott of 779 votes, the latest blow to Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who is behind some 12,000 votes as the hand recount started on Friday morning.

“Basically, I just worked my ass off for nothing,” said Joseph D’Alessandro, Broward County’s election planning and development director. He claimed that he was unfamiliar with the website used to upload the results, reported NBC, blaming that for the delay.

Earlier, election workers had said they would be submitting the results at 2:50 p.m., 10 minutes before the deadline.

Elections workers feed ballots into tabulation machines at the Broward County Supervisor of Elections office in Lauderhill, Fla., on Nov. 10, 2018. Joe Skipper/Getty Images

“We uploaded to the state two minutes late so the state has chosen not to use our machine recount results,” D’Alessandro said, reported Fox News. “They are going to use our first unofficial results as our second unofficial results.” He also admitted that there was “a co-mingling of ballots” and that the county “did not correctly handle the ballot[s].”

Two other counties had trouble meeting the deadline. Palm Beach claimed it was several hours from compiling a total count, despite machines resting for over 10 hours there. In Hillsborough County, officials said they refused to report its recount tally because the recount showed 846 fewer votes than the initial tally. The recount would have awarded Scott around 150 net votes.

“Even though we achieved 99.84 percent success in our recount effort, we are not willing to accept that votes go unreported,” Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Craig Latimer told reporters. “For that reason, the Canvassing Board has decided that the first unofficial results will stand as our second unofficial.”

Scott said late on Nov. 15 that he considers the race over. “Last week, Florida voters elected me as their next U.S. Senator and now the ballots have been counted twice. I am incredibly proud and humbled by the opportunity to serve Florida in Washington. Our state needs to move forward,” he said in a statement.

Hand Recount

According to the Miami Herald, the manual recount started in Broward at 8 a.m. and was planned to finish within 12 hours, focusing on the Senate race before using Saturday to deal with the Commissioner of Agriculture race.

The deadline for the hand recount for the Senate race, triggered by the fact that the margin after the machine recount remained within 0.25 percentage points, is on Nov. 18.

The manual recount only deals with under or overvotes, or contested ballots in which it’s difficult to ascertain who the voter wanted to vote for. These include ballots where the bubbles for both Scott and Nelson are marked and ballots where bubbles aren’t fully filled, among other issues.

At each table is a Republican representative, a Democrat representative, and a two-person volunteer counting team. In Broward, they would be processing about 31,000 votes.

In Miami-Dade, one of the largest counties in the state which has consistently beat deadlines by many hours, the manual vote of some 10,000 votes began late Thursday as workers tallied overnight. In Palm Beach, workers planned to start at 11 a.m. on Friday.

From NTD News