Rod Thomson

In a victory for the campaign hopes of U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a federal judge has ordered all of Florida’s elections officials to give nearly 4,000 voters — or more maybe 7,000, no one is sure — whose ballots were rejected over mismatched signatures until Saturday to fix the problem and for their votes to count.

Judge Mark Walker ruled early today that apparently all of the state’s elections offices have wrongly, or unconstitutionally, applied the state law governing how voters can fix rejected signatures on absentee and provisional ballots. There were a known 3,700 ballots rejected in the Midterm election after canvassing boards determined that the signature on a mail-in or provisional ballot did not match the signature the state had on file for that voter.

Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson’s campaign sued last week to invalidate the signature rejection process, amid a series of lawsuits attempting to change Florida voting laws through the courts and push more votes into the final tallies.

Judge Walker issued a 34-page order granting a temporary injunction at the request of the Nelson campaign, and directed the state’s supervisors of elections to gives these voters until 5 p.m. Saturday to “cure” the problem.

The law had given voters had until the day before the election to fix the signature issue. So this ruling does change state law for this election, as it allows votes to be counted after the law said they cannot be.

If these are all Democrat votes, and most of them likely will be, they alone would not be enough to flip the two major elections. But they would get it closer.

In the Senate race, Republican Gov. Rick Scott is leading Nelson by 12,562 votes, or 0.15 percent. In the Governor’s race, Republican Ron DeSantis is up 0.41 percent, or 33,684 votes, on Democrat Andrew Gillum.

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However, and this is a really big caveat, it isn’t really known the total number of ballots that were rejected or mismatched signatures. Only 45 of Florida’s 67 counties had provided totals to the court on mismatched signatures during Walker’s hearing on the lawsuit last week. So it will likely be higher, but how much higher, no one knows. Some have predicted it could be 7,000.

Scott’s campaign is appealing Walker’s order. But that does not seem likely to change anything at this point.

Further, Judge Walker is scheduled to hear more lawsuits, including a challenge by Nelson to the state’s procedures for counting overvotes and undervotes. The Nelson campaign is confident they will close the gap through the overvote and undervote process, and more so if they can change the process.

The Nelson campaign is also suing to extend today’s deadline for Florida’s elections supervisors to get their recount totals to Tallahassee.

Rod Thomson is an author, TV talking head and former journalist, and is Founder of The Revolutionary Act. Rod is co-host of Right Talk America With Julio and Rod on the Salem Radio Network.

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