A crowd protests outside the Broward County Supervisor of Elections office on Friday, Nov. 9, 2018, in Lauderhill, Fla. | Joe Skipper/AP Photo Ghosts of 2000 haunt Florida recount Democrat Andrew Gillum withdraws his concession in the governor’s race.

LAUDERHILL, Fla. — The ghosts of Florida’s botched and aborted 2000 presidential election haunted the state Saturday as officials formally called for three automatic recounts to decide the next U.S. senator, governor and agriculture commissioner. Recounts were also ordered in three legislative races.

Expected since Election Day, the recounts herald a new and bitter partisan chapter in the political history of Florida — which became the ultimate but dysfunctional swing state 18 years ago when it decided the presidency by 537 votes — as Republicans leveled unfounded charges of voter fraud while Democrats revived their decades-old chant to count every vote.


Once again, a losing candidate withdrew his concession. And again South Florida elections supervisors find themselves under the national spotlight’s glare as they slowly tally votes and face credible accusations of mismanagement — with Broward County including 22 “illegal” ballots that should not have been counted and a judge rebuking Palm Beach County over the way it duplicated at least 650 ballots that were damaged when the originals were destroyed.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum on Saturday rescinded his concession to Republican Ron DeSantis in that contest.

"I am replacing my words of concession with an uncompromised and unapologetic call that we count every single vote," Gillum said at a news conference. "What has also changed since election night have been the chorus of voices — from the President of the United States, the junior senator of the state of Florida, and the governor of the state of Florida — a chorus calling for the ending of the counting in this process."

Gillum is down nearly 34,000 votes, and his climb remains steep. Underscoring the huge task at hand is the fact that the largest vote swing in a gubernatorial recount was 2,208 votes, during Washington state’s 2004 gubernatorial race, according to the FairVote Research Project.

DeSantis focused on the vote gap that remains between him and Gillum, breaking days of silence in a one-minute video again declaring victory and never mentioning the world “recount.”

“With the election behind us, it’s now time to come together as a state as we prepare to serve all Floridians,” DeSantis said in the video.

As in 2000, the lack of clarity in state law acts as a full-employment act for lawyers from both parties waging war in courthouses instead of on the campaign trail. In Leon County, for example, which was getting very little statewide attention as the recount began, at least five attorneys for both campaigns were among those in attendance as a meeting of the Leon County Canvassing Board officially kicked off at 2 p.m Saturday.

“I just don’t want to do this again,” said a weary Mark Herron, one of Florida’s top election-law lawyers, who was part of former Vice President Al Gore’s recount team in 2000 vs. George W. Bush. “I just don’t wanna.”

Under state law, the races and winners are supposed to be certified in 10 days, on Nov. 20, but it’s unclear how long the recounts and court fights will take.

For all the similarities between 2000 and today, there are stark differences.

In Bush vs. Gore, the ultra-slim margin made the ultimate outcome impossible to predict. But in today’s races for U.S. Senate, governor and agriculture commissioner, the margins for all the front-runners are large enough to make the outcome favor them far more after the end of the recounts, which are triggered under Florida law when the margin in a race hits 0.5 percentage points.

Of the three statewide races, DeSantis had the biggest lead, 0.41 percentage points, or 33,684 votes, as of noon Saturday, when the 67 county election supervisors in the state were required to submit unofficial results to the state.

In the Senate race, Republican Gov. Rick Scott led Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson by 0.15 percentage points, or 12,562 votes. And in the race for agriculture commissioner, Democrat Nikki Fried was ahead of Republican Matt Caldwell by the smallest amount, 0.07 percent.

If the margins remain below 0.25 percent in the races for Senate and agriculture commissioner, they’ll be subject to a manual recount. In that process, the ballots that show either no votes (called undervotes) or multiple votes (overvotes) are inspected by hand to determine voter intent.

Marc Elias, a well-known Democratic election law attorney working for Nelson, maintained his overwhelming optimism during a conference call with reporters after the recount began.

“I expect to see that margin to evaporate entirely and for Sen. Nelson to take a small lead,” Elias said.

Armed with zero evidence, Scott has worked to stoke fears of “rampant [voter] fraud.” On Thursday, he called on state law enforcement to investigate both the Broward County and Palm Beach County election offices, both of which are playing a key role in counting votes in his race. The following day, law enforcement confirmed there was no evidence of voter fraud and there was no active investigation.

In addition, Scott’s administration sent election monitors to Broward County after Election Supervisor Brenda Snipes was found to have violated state and federal law for illegally destroying ballots in during the 2016 election cycle. Those monitors have also reported no fraud.

The laws governing Florida recounts were overhauled following the 2000 elections meltdown, characterized by stop-and-start recounts and multiple lawsuits that finally ended with the controversial Bush v. Gore ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court.

But one outstanding legal wrinkle remained before Saturday’s noon deadline approached: Could ballots counted after the deadline be counted toward the unofficial results that were already due, or would they not count at all? Democrats wanted them counted. Republicans were drafting court motions to fight that.

As was the case all week, the controversy primarily revolved around Democrat-dominated Broward County, where Snipes has been under fire since the day after the election. The county sent its unofficial results to the state but then kept counting ballots. Snipes’ office gave out conflicting information about what was supposed to be counted.

The Miami Herald reported that Snipes included 22 ballots in the total that were cast by voters whose signature did not match the signature on file. Ballots with mismatched signatures are considered “illegal” under state law, which is designed to stop voter fraud.

But Snipes included them anyway in a batch of 205 provisional ballots. Once the votes were mixed together, the anonymous votes couldn’t be determined. So they were just included, Snipes told the paper, because “it seems unfair to me to disenfranchise 205 voters at the expense of a small number.”

The day before, a court forced Snipes to provide Scott’s campaign data about who voted in the election and the remaining votes to be counted — information she should have had at her ready disposal and easily rendered under Florida public records law.

Republicans charged that Snipes also failed to follow a state law requiring results to be updated every 45 minutes. Instead, tens of thousands of votes would be dumped into the state system — sometimes late at night — causing the margins in the major races to shrink as the ballots from the Democrat-heavy county poured in.

Heading into the election, Snipes’ office was being monitored by Scott administration officials after she lost a May court case for the unlawful destruction of ballots. Marring her résumé further, around the same time Snipes lost another court case over the way she privately handled absentee ballots outside the view of the county canvassing board, a three-member panel that meets in public to handle ballot controversies and certify local elections.

In Palm Beach County, Election Supervisor Susan Bucher also was slow to report results and continued counting ballots on Saturday. She was sued by the Scott campaign for her office’s decision to have staff duplicate at least 650 damaged ballots. The law says the ballots should go first to the county’s canvassing board.

“The language [of the law] is unambiguous that it is for the canvassing board to make the determination,” Circuit Court Judge Krista Marx on Saturday scolded Bucher, whom she also chastised for blowing a court-imposed deadline. “It’s my opinion zip-a-dee-doo-dah has been done to comply,” the judge said.

Bucher, in turn, picked a fight with the press and tried to block cameras from recording the canvassing board. She also attacked President Donald Trump, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Scott for their claims that the process was marked by fraud or Democrats trying to “steal” the election.

“It’s very unfortunate that some of the highest elected officials in our country are trying to disrupt our democracy because they don’t like the demographics of our voters,” she told reporters. “I would wish that they would allow us to continue to count the ballots. We're just doing our job in accordance with law.”

Rubio pointed out that his home county, Miami-Dade, is the largest in the state — ahead of second-largest Broward to the north and third-largest Palm Beach above it in South Florida — and yet it was able to finish its vote counting without the same controversies and slow results.

Another lawsuit, meanwhile, looms: Nelson’s campaign has sued Scott’s secretary of state over what it says is a capricious standard for verifying voter signatures on absentee and provisional ballots. The campaign wants all the ballots with mismatched signatures to count; Scott’s campaign calls that an invitation for fraud.

Nelson and Gillum’s campaigns want so many votes to count that they even objected when Bucher rejected a ballot that was being reviewed from a person who was not a U.S. citizen.

“For them, illegally-cast votes are just as good as legally-cast votes, as long as they voted for Democrats,” Scott campaign spokesman Chris Hartline said on Twitter.

When the recount was announced, the trailing candidates had the opportunity to quit and hand the victory to their opponent. Gillum had announced Election Day that he was conceding, but that was before all the final votes were added to the total.

In at least three cases in Broward County, some elections-office boxes labeled as if they had ballots in them were left behind in some polling stations, raising suspicions about chain of custody and incomplete vote tallies.

Outside the elections office in Broward and Palm Beach counties, demonstrators from both parties jeered at each other and hurled insults, an eerie echo of the divided crowds in 2000. Democrats chanted “Count every vote!” Republicans, speaking of Bucher and Snipes, chanted back: “Lock her up!”

In Broward, Republicans also wondered about newly “found” votes as they saw moving trucks backing up into the loading dock at the Lauderhill elections office. Andrew Pollack, a Republican resident of Broward County and father of one of the students murdered during the school shooting in Parkland this year, shot video of the moving trucks and railed against Snipes as an incompetent.

“If I went bowling,” Pollack said, “she probably couldn’t keep score.”