Broward County finishes its recount but fails to send totals to state by the deadline

Lisa Conley | Naples

Show Caption Hide Caption Broward County recounts 700,000 ballots amid fraud allegations Florida has ordered statewide recounts for Senate and gubernatorial races amid alleged ballot fraud in Broward County.

FORT LAUDERDALE – Broward County finished recounting ballots in three top Florida races Thursday but failed to send the totals to the state before the deadline.

County officials proudly proclaimed Thursday that they had completed the machine recounts in the Senate, governor and agriculture commissioner races 14 minutes before the state-mandated 3 p.m. Thursday deadline, despite doubts earlier in the week that it would be able to do so.

But Broward did not send those totals in time to the Department of State, which oversees elections, said agency spokeswoman Sarah Revell. The county missed the 3 p.m. deadline to submit the recount totals to the agency by two minutes, she said.

The state department instead accepted the vote totals Broward sent on Saturday, the first unofficial deadline the county had to meet.

As it turned out, the recount results in Broward were not significantly different than the Saturday results.

The original results released Saturday in the Senate race showed Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson with 471,334 votes in Broward, compared to Republican Gov. Rick Scott's 211,119. After the recount both candidates lost votes — Nelson had 469,949 votes and Scott had 210,513 votes.

Both counts gave Nelson about 69 percent of the vote, marking no real change for the senator who hopes to overcome Scott's statewide lead of about 12,500 votes.

The vote totals dropped Thursday because Broward continues to review a couple of thousand ballots that were damaged and had to be copied. They will be reviewed and reported later by the county's canvassing board.

The recount results also show about 23,000 undervotes in the Senate race, meaning fewer ballots were cast in that race than the governor's race. That's about the same number of undervotes identified in Saturday's results.

Nelson's lawyers have argued that they believed the machine recount just completed would reveal a significant number of votes for the Democrat that were missed when the ballots first went through before and on Election Day. But the recount didn't appear to produce those.

In the governor's race, Democrat Andrew Gillum had 481,677 votes in Broward, compared to Ron DeSantis’ 221,873 votes, according to Saturday's results. After the recount finished Thursday, Gillum had 480,304 votes and DeSantis had 221,252.

In the race for commissioner of agriculture, Democrat Nikki Fried had 478,829 votes, compared to Matt Caldwell’s 213,938 votes, according to Saturday's results. After Thursday’s recount, Fried had 477,448 votes and Caldwell had 213,322.

Again, very little change in the totals for the candidates.

The majority of the recount was completed around 1 a.m. Thursday. Workers spent the rest of the day duplicating and counting just under 400 ballots.

In case you missed it: Democrat Bill Nelson sues for access to Florida ballots submitted illegally in GOP-rich county

And: Florida Dems planned to use altered forms to fix mail ballots across state after deadline

Broward County is one of two heavily Democratic counties that have been targeted with accusations of election irregularities after officials added thousands of votes days after last week's election. The additional votes reduced statewide leads by Republican candidates, including flipping one state race to the Democratic candidate.

Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes, who has personally come under fire for her handling of the election, said she included in the count 205 contested ballots, 23 of which were deemed invalid.

"Because I cannot determine which 23 ballots were invalidated due to intermingling of ballots, I've determined to count all 205 votes," to avoid disenfranchising voters, she said Thursday.

If those 23 votes end up determining the election after the certification process is completed, then there would be a proper election contest issued, Snipes said.

Previously: With history of election controversy, Broward County ballots could change Florida elections

More: Terms you need to know as Florida moves toward contentious recounts in several races

The controversy in Broward began hours after polls closed on Election Day. The county's results showed the Scott-Nelson race for Senate with significantly fewer votes — nearly 20,000 — than other races on the ballot, including the governor's race.

The lack of votes recorded in Broward suggested that far fewer ballots were cast in the Scott-Nelson race, but after the election Broward officials added more than 70,000 votes, including early in-person and absentee ballots, to the count. The votes added to the count increased the totals for the Democrats in those top state races, and helped push the races into machine recount territory.

The county will start manually recounting ballots 7 a.m. Friday.

Reporter Ana Ceballos contributed to this report.