Democratic Florida Sen. Bill Nelson on Friday accused Republican Gov. Rick Scott of using his position to prevent an accurate vote count in their Senate race.
“Scott is abusing the full force of his public office as governor to stop a complete and accurate counting of all the votes in Florida, which would determine whether he wins or loses,” Nelson said in a statement Friday.
Scott declared victory in the Senate race late Tuesday but his election night lead has narrowed to just 15,000 votes after Broward County and Palm Beach County election officials found 80,000 additional ballots.
The two counties are Democratic strongholds with a history of election integrity problems.
Nelson, who has held the senate seat since 2000, has refused to concede the race and his legal team is scrambling to ensure all regular and provisional ballots are counted. They say the race is tight enough to trigger a manual recount, but that will be determined as early as Saturday when all ballots from all 67 Florida counties must be tallied by state officials.
Scott accused Broward and Palm Beach County officials of trying to fraudulently alter the results to hand Nelson a victory.
“I will not sit idly by while unethical liberals try to steal this election,” Scott said Thursday. He also ordered Florida law enforcement to investigate the election officials in both counties.
But Nelson believes Scott is impeding the counting of all ballots.
“Clearly, Rick Scott is trying to stop all the votes from being counted and he’s impeding the democratic process,” Nelson said Friday. “You can see this from his irresponsible, unethical and unprecedented press statement last night that he’s worried and he’s desperate.”
Earlier in the day, Nelson’s lawyer predicted that a hand recount would be needed given how close the race turned out. Scott was up just 15,068 votes on Friday out of more than 8 million cast.
