Florida starts painstaking hand recount in U.S. Senate race

Volunteers gathered around folding tables Friday to begin a painstaking hand recount in Florida's acrimonious U.S. Senate contest, with a goal of determining the intent of about 93,000 voters whose ballots for Republican Gov. Rick Scott orDemocratic Sen. Bill Nelson could not be counted by machine.

The hand recount is required by state law whenever candidates areseparated by 0.25 percentage points or less.

Unofficial resultsshowed Scott ahead of Nelson by 0.15 percentage points, or fewerthan 13,000 votes out of more than eight million cast.

In Broward County, officials relied on a colour-coded system to tally some of the last ballots by hand.

Ballots with clear votes for Scott went intoa bin with a red tag. Clear votes for Nelsonwent into one with a blue tag. Blank ballots went into a bin with ayellow tag. Anything that needed further examination by thecanvassing board was dropped into one with a green tag.

Dozens of volunteers sitting behind the bins stacked on foldingtables in a Broward County warehouse cheered loudly when theyfinished their hand recount Friday morning. Results were notimmediately announced.

Counting overvotes, undervotes

At the election supervisor's office in Tampa, volunteers werejoined by observers from both political parties at 12 tables as therecount started.

The ballots were in a locked wire basket on a rolling cart whenthey were delivered to the room. An elections office employee cutthe lock off the basket, and the ballots were distributed to thetables, where teams of two volunteers examined each one.

The hand recount does not review all votes. It involves ballotsthat were not recorded by voting machines because voters cast eithertwo votes for one race, which is called an overvote, or appeared tochoose no candidate, which is an undervote. The idea is to figureout a voter's intent.

Broward County,which experienced numerous problems throughoutthe election,had the most overvotes and undervotes of any Floridacounty almost 31,000.

Just a day earlier, the county missed the deadline to submit itsmachine recount results by two minutes. But it finished its manualrecount in just a few hours, which Elections Supervisor BrendaSnipes attributed to the large number of volunteers assembled forthe task.

The contest for governor appeared all but over Thursday, with amachine recount showing Republican RonDeSantis with a large enoughadvantage over Democrat Andrew Gillum to avoid a hand recount inthat race, which had a margin of 0.41 per cent.

Recount fraught with problems

The overall recount has been fraught with problems. One large Democratic stronghold in South Florida could not finish its machinerecount by the Thursday deadline because of machines breaking down.

A federal judge rejected a request to extend the recount deadline.

"We gave a heroic effort," said Palm Beach Supervisor ofElections Susan Bucher. If the county had three or four more hours,it would have made the deadline to recount ballots in the Senaterace, she said.

Two election-related lawsuits were pending in federal court in Tallahassee.

On Thursday, the situation drew the ire of U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, who slammed the state for repeatedly failing toanticipate election problems. He also said the state law on recountsappears to violate the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that decided thepresidency in 2000.

"We have been the laughingstock of the world, election afterelection, and we chose not to fix this," Walker said at a hearing.

Incoming Florida Senate president Bill Galvano said Friday thatlawmakers will discuss changes to the state's election laws.

By the next election cycle, he said, "voters are going to wantto have more in terms of assurance that their votes are going to beproperly counted."

In the meantime, Florida voters have until 5 p.m. Saturday toshow a valid identification and fix their ballots if they haven'tbeen counted due to mismatched signatures.

State officials testified that nearly 4,000 mail-in ballots wereset aside because local officials decided the signatures on theenvelopes did not match the signatures on file. If those voters canprove their identity, their votes will now be counted and includedin final official returns due from each county by noon Sunday.