LAUDERHILL, Florida -- Florida's two largest counties completed hand recounts in the state's hotly contested U.S. Senate race Friday morning, dispatching the meticulous process with startling speed.
Broward County, which had stumbled through a rocky machine recount, rolled through the state-mandated hand recount in just two hours Friday morning with only minimal arguments from partisan lawyers. Just to the south, Miami-Dade -- the state's most populous -- completed its hand recount at almost the same time.
The process finished just hours after workers in a Broward County warehouse began poring over thousands of ballots as part of an unprecedented statewide hand recount in an election plagued by mechanical malfunctions, missed deadlines and lawsuits.
The hand recount follows an error-plagued statewide machine recount that appears to have settled Florida's closely watched gubernatorial race, with President Donald Trump's favored candidate, Ron DeSantis, retaining his lead over Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, a Democrat, who has refused to concede.
But the machine recount, which ended Thursday, did not produce a definitive result in Florida's U.S. Senate race. In that contest, Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, a three-term incumbent, trails Republican Gov. Rick Scott by 12,603 votes, a margin that fell below the .25 percent mark that would have averted a hand recount.
The hand recount does not review all votes. It involves ballots that were not recorded by voting machines because voters cast either two votes for one race, which is called an overvote, or appeared to choose no candidate, which is an undervote. The idea is to figure out a voter's intent.
In Broward, election workers and observers gathered at 6 a.m. and streamed into the Broward warehouse, taking their places at 100 plastic tables. Gloves were distributed for the delicate task of handling paper ballots.
The complexity of the task was immediately apparent. The canvassing board had to wrestle with ballots that had inked-in bubbles next to both Nelson's and Scott's names, ballots with tiny flecks of ink called "pen rests" and a ballot that had a bubble filled in, but also had an X over the bubble.
One particularly curious ballot had the bubble next to Nelson's name filled in, but also listed a write-in candidate named "Rick Nelson." The Broward canvassing judges decided that one should count for Nelson, even though it seemed to conflate the Democrat's last name with the Republican's first name. They applied a concept called the "rule of consistency," noting that the same voter had also filled in the bubble next to gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum's name while also listing Gillum as a write-in candidate.
The manual recount will also likely determine the outcome in Florida's agriculture commissioner race, a contest that has drawn widespread attention because it pits two politicians considered to be rising stars: Nikki Fried, a Democratic medical marijuana advocate, and Republican Matt Caldwell. Going into Friday's recount, Fried led by 5,307 votes.
Election officials in Broward County were under extreme pressure Friday after their botched handling of the machine recount the day before. The county's machine-based tally was rejected by Florida's secretary of state because it was submitted two minutes past a 3 p.m. deadline. The tardy submission meant that Broward's original vote count was used.
The machine recounts in two other large Florida counties -- Hillsborough in the Tampa area and Palm Beach on the state's east coast -- were also beset with problems. Palm Beach's aging voting machines repeatedly overheated, and the county's embattled elections chief, Susan Bucher, had to notify state officials that she could not complete the machine recount. In Hillsborough, election officials intentionally did not submit the results of their machine recount because the vote total fell more than 800 short of the total they had originally counted.
Incoming Florida Senate President Bill Galvano said Friday that lawmakers will discuss changes to the state's election laws.
By the next election cycle, he said, "voters are going to want to have more in terms of assurance that their votes are going to be properly counted."
In the meantime, Florida voters have until 5 p.m. today to show a valid identification and fix their ballots if they haven't been counted due to mismatched signatures.
State officials testified that nearly 4,000 mail-in ballots were set aside because local officials decided the signatures on the envelopes did not match the signatures on file. If those voters can prove their identity, their votes will be counted and included in final official returns due from each county by noon Sunday.
Information for this article was contributed by Manuel Roig-Franzia of The Washington Post; and by Kelli Kennedy, Chris O'Meara, Tamara Lush, Curt Anderson and Jennifer Kay of The Associated Press.
A Section on 11/17/2018