“So what happens now? Apparently they just keep on counting.”
Oh, you can bet on that!!
SOURCE: orlandosentinel.com
TALLAHASSEE — Nine days after Florida’s Election Day, the deadline for machine recounts of three statewide races came and went Thursday, but Andrew Gillum refused to concede and urged vote counting to continue even as his margin behind Ron DeSantis was slimmed by just one vote.
“A vote denied is justice denied — the State of Florida must count every legally cast vote,” Gillum said in a statement as the machine recount was completed in 66 of 67 counties. “As today’s unofficial reports and recent court proceedings make clear, there are tens of thousands of votes that have yet to be counted. We plan to do all we can to ensure that every voice is heard in this process.’’
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, calling the state a “laughingstock,’’ refused to suspend deadlines in the races for U.S. Senate, governor and agriculture commissioner of 3 p.m. Thursday for machine recounts and noon Sunday for hand recounts.
Gillum had trailed Republican Ron DeSantis by 33,684 votes before the recount began, and while both candidates lost votes in the recount, the margin on Thursday was trimmed by one vote to 33,683.
In Palm Beach, the county’s Election Office was unable to perform a recount because of malfunctioning vote-counting machines. The county had to revert to its initial, pre-recount numbers as part of the new statewide results. “It was a heroic effort and we just completed uploading our Saturday results, as was required by law,” elections chief Susan Bucher announced on Thursday as the 3 p.m. deadline passed. A manual recount of 5,900 overvotes and undervotes was set to begin in Palm Beach at 4 p.m., but Nelson attorney Marc Elias wrote on Twitter the campaign would sue to have all ballots in Palm Beach hand-counted “due to systematic machine failure during the machine recount.”
In Orange County, the hand recount of 259 overvotes and 2,977 undervotes was expected to begin Friday morning. All six major candidates lost votes in the machine recount in Orange, with the Democrats losing on average about 27 more votes than Republicans. Nelson lost 94 votes, Gillum 84 and Fried 75, while Scott lost 59, DeSantis 55 and Caldwell 59. In Seminole, the three Republican candidates each gained 3 or 4 votes and each Democrats lost between three and five votes. In Lake, Democrats each lost 13 or 14 votes while Republicans lost between 5 and 8. But the percentage point difference in Orange, Seminole and Lake in all three races in remained exactly the same.
SOURCE: Orlando Sentinel