Sen. Bill Nelson has no viable path to winning a recount of ballots in Florida’s U.S. Senate race, but he’s still refusing to concede.
Nelson, a Democrat who has held the seat since 2000, remains about 12,600 votes behind Republican Gov. Rick Scott after a machine recount concluded Thursday.
Neither an ongoing hand recount nor an extended deadline for rejected mail-in ballots is likely to produce enough votes to put Nelson on top. But he’s not giving up.
“I truly believe we can win this race together,” Nelson told supporters in a fundraising email Friday.
The head of Nelson’s legal team, election recount veteran Marc Elias, said he believes a manual recount of irregular ballots that began Thursday would close the gap. But so far, it hasn’t.
Broward County, a Democratic stronghold where there were tens of thousands of ballots that did not register a Senate choice, finished a manual recount early Friday without producing the missing votes for Nelson.
Elias believed those missing votes were skipped by the machine tabulators and would be discovered by volunteers conducting a hand recount. But the Senate race was instead left blank on those ballots, according to Broward election officials.
Nelson attempted to challenge the rule narrowing the recount to the machine-rejected ballots, but a judge ruled against him.
The manual recount tallies for all of the state’s 67 counties are due Sunday, and state officials will certify and announce final and official results on Tuesday.
Between now and then, Nelson is still hoping for a miracle in the thousands of ballots that were discarded but are now able to be made legitimate thanks to a court ruling this week. The ballots were tossed out under the state’s signature match law, but District Court Judge Mark Walker ruled that voters have until Sunday to correct mismatched signatures.
In addition, election officials statewide accepted overseas and military ballots up until Friday.
There could be up to 7,000 ballots impacted by the extended deadline for fixing mismatched signatures, but even if all of those were counted in favor of Nelson, a victory is still mathematically out of reach for Nelson.
Scott’s campaign team repeatedly called on Nelson to concede the race, pointing to the math and accusing Nelson’s legal team of attempting to overturn election laws to win the race.
“With the hand recount concluding in most counties across the state showing no significant change in the margin, it’s time for Bill Nelson to face reality and concede,” Scott’s campaign spokesperson, Chris Hartline, said Friday.
Nelson may end up blaming a loss on the design of the ballot in Broward County. The Senate race is the first one on the ballot, on the left-hand side and underneath the voting instructions.
Some believe the ballot design used in Broward County made it easy to miss the race. Nearly 31,000 ballots left the race blank, out of 714,859 cast.
By comparison, fewer than 6,000 ballots left blank the governor’s race, which was situated prominently in the middle of the ballot.
But this week, Nelson was keeping his hopes up. He even traveled to Washington to participate in organizing activities for the next Congress.
But so did Scott.
“We won,” Scott said this week.
