Florida’s election for U.S. Senate moves to a manual recount, ordered by the secretary of state after a machine recount showed the two candidates about 0.15 percent apart in vote tallies.
Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner announced machine recount tallies Thursday afternoon that showed Republican Gov. Rick Scott with 4,097,689 votes and Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson with 4,085,086 votes.
It’s a difference of less than 0.25, which triggers an automatic manual recount.
Nelson has no plans to concede, his lawyer announced Thursday, despite calls from Scott that he end the recount because he believes his lead is insurmountable.
Lawyer Marc Elias, however, said Nelson’s team believes the margin has changed little since before the machine recount and noted that a few counties have not submitted all votes, including Palm Beach and Broward counties, two Democratic strongholds.
Elias said they are suing to delay when counties must submit final numbers.
Florida law set a Nov. 18 deadline for the manual recount.
Elias said Nelson could pick up votes in the hand recount as well as a court-ordered extension for voters to correct ballots discarded over mismatched signatures.
“It was never our view it would be one silver bullet that would change the margin in this race,” Elias said.
He believes thousands of votes could change in a manual recount because the machine tablulator excludes many ballots that the naked eye might include.
“As we move forward I fully expect that 12,500 margin will go down and disappear entirely,” he said.
Scott has called on Nelson to stop the recount. His campaign team said earlier in the day Scott’s lead had increased to more than 13,000 votes, which is still within the margin requiring a manual recount.
Scott’s campaign appealed a district court judge ruling extending the deadline until Saturday for those whose ballots were discarded over mismatched signatures. The appeal was denied late Thursday.
