Florida Braces for Election Recounts, Now Including the Race for Governor

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Legal wrangling began in earnest in Florida on Thursday, as top political campaigns girded for the possibility of lengthy and expensive vote recounts in a Senate race that remains too close to call and, unexpectedly, also in the closely contested governor’s race.

Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, claimed victory in the Senate contest on Tuesday against Sen. Bill Nelson, the Democratic incumbent. But the vote gap between them has only narrowed since then, as the state’s largest counties have continued to tally ballots that were mailed in or cast on a provisional basis on Election Day.

The gap has also closed in the governor’s race, which is now in recount territory as well. Andrew Gillum, a Democrat, conceded to Ron DeSantis, a Republican, late Tuesday night, shortly before The Associated Press called the race for DeSantis. But DeSantis’ victory margin has since shrunk to 0.47 percentage points — three-hundredths of a point below the recount threshold. DeSantis leads by more than 38,000 votes.

Florida’s 67 counties have until noon Saturday to submit their unofficial vote totals to the state’s division of elections. Four more contests — for state agriculture commissioner, one state Senate seat and two state House seats — are also likely to be headed for recounts. The lead in the agriculture commissioner race flipped on Thursday afternoon: Nikki Fried, a Democrat, moved ahead of Matt Caldwell, a Republican, by 575 votes.

The highest-profile recount possibility so far, however, is in the U.S. Senate race. As of Thursday afternoon, 17,344 votes separated Scott and Nelson, a difference of 0.22 percentage points. Under Florida law, a margin smaller than 0.5 points prompts a machine recount, and a margin of 0.25 points or less requires a more thorough manual recount.

“From where I sit, it is a virtual certainty,” said Marc Elias, Nelson’s elections lawyer and a veteran of prominent recounts around the country. “I think that it is fair to say right now that the results of the 2018 Senate election are unknown.”

Elias went even further, predicting that outstanding ballots in heavily Democratic Palm Beach and Broward counties would ultimately put Nelson over the top, though he acknowledged that the campaign does not know how many ballots are left to count. “At the end of this process, we believe Sen. Nelson is going to be declared the winner,” Elias said.

Scott’s campaign has dismissed the possibility that Scott, who won his two races for governor by 1 percentage point, could lose his lead in the Senate election. In a statement Thursday, the Scott team called Elias “a hired gun from Washington, D.C., who will try to win an election for Nelson that Nelson has already lost.”

“Let’s be clear: When Elias says ‘win,’ he means ‘steal,'” Scott’s campaign said. “It is sad and embarrassing that Bill Nelson would resort to these low tactics after voters have clearly spoken.”

Of particular concern to Republicans is the slow pace of counting in Broward, the state’s second most populous county, where a court ruled in May that the office of the elections supervisor, Brenda Snipes, had illegally destroyed some ballots from a 2016 congressional race.

Snipes, an elected Democrat, told reporters Thursday that she could not say how many votes were left to count from this week’s election, only that all mailed-in ballots in the county had already been taken out of their envelopes.

“I think we had over 58 percent of our voters voted, and each voter received a ballot package of either five or six pages,” she said when asked about why counting was taking so long. “It’s volume that causes this.”

Results from Broward so far indicate that nearly 25,000 people cast votes for governor but not for senator, even though the Senate race came first on the ballot. Enthusiasm for Gillum’s candidacy may account for some of the difference, since he excited many voters who cared chiefly about electing him. But some Democrats believe that the design of the ballot used in the county played a role: The Senate contest appeared in the bottom left-hand corner of the first page, beneath the instructions to voters, where it may have been easily overlooked.

Elias said the difference between the votes for Senate and governor in the county was significant, but he refrained from criticizing the ballot layout, at least for now.

Once counties report their unofficial totals to the state Saturday, Secretary of State Ken Detzner, an appointee of Scott, will be able to order any of the legally mandated recounts.

A statewide machine recount would have to be completed by 3 p.m. Nov. 15, Elias said. If that process yields a margin of less than 0.25 percentage points in any federal or state races, then Detzner would order manual recounts in those races of what are known as undervotes and overvotes; the recounts would have to be completed by Nov. 18.

In the Senate race, undervotes are ballots on which optical-scanning machines detected a vote for another race down the ballot, like governor or attorney general, but no selection for Senate. Overvotes are ballots on which scanners detected that the voter had marked more than one choice in the race.

Florida voters fill in paper ballots by hand using a pen, and no longer cast the punch-card ballots that produced the infamous “hanging chads” in the 2000 presidential election.

Candidates cannot request recounts, but those with fewer votes in a race can refuse them. State Democrats dispatched lawyers to county canvassing boards and sent volunteers to campaign offices to track the counting of provisional ballots. Gillum addressed supporters on Facebook on Thursday afternoon.

“In spite of the fact that we’re a little bit down in the numbers, we’re hopeful that every single vote will be counted in this race,” he said. “That way, all of us can walk away extremely confident about what each and every one of us did.”

DeSantis, for his part, has already announced his transition team.

“I’m proud to have been elected on Tuesday night,” he said in a brief statement to reporters after an event in the town of Hialeah Gardens.

“It’s a great honor. We’re working really hard on the transition," DeSantis said. “We’ll let the lawyers do what they’ve got to do. But we’re good, and I’m looking forward to serving.”