When the dust settled from the 2018 Florida Senate recount, Republican Rick Scott had beaten Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson by 10,033 votes. Give or take a few hundred. Maybe more. As the New York Times put it on November 16, in what was one of the more understated headlines of the year, “Nearly 3,000 Votes Disappeared from Florida’s Recount. That’s Not Supposed to Happen.”
No, it’s not. The American people are asked to have a bit of faith in our system of government, but no faith should be required when it comes to election results. Faith depends on believing in things unseen, and ballots can be seen and touched, counted and recounted. But in a few counties in Florida, election officials essentially asked the voters to close their eyes, click their heels together three times, and believe that their initial unofficial results were correct, even though hundreds or thousands of votes had gone missing during the machine recount.
In Democratic Broward County, 2,040 fewer votes were counted during the machine recount than in the initial count, and the loss of votes would have decreased Democrat Bill Nelson’s margin in Broward by nearly 800 votes. The Times reported that elections supervisor Brenda Snipes “said the ballots that weren’t included in the recount had probably been misfiled with another stack of ballots.”
Probably.
So Broward relied on its initial vote count rather than its machine recount. Hillsborough County and Palm Beach County did the same. In Hillsborough, there were 850 fewer votes in the recount totals, due to power failures, according to officials. In Palm Beach, Democratic supervisor Susan Bucher said there were “dozens of precincts missing a significant number” of votes, but the county was unable to complete its machine recount. “Ms. Bucher blamed an overheated and outdated ballot-scanning machine,” the Times reported. “But the manufacturer of the high-speed scanner used in Palm Beach said its technicians had witnessed Palm Beach County elections workers, apparently worried that one of the machines was running too fast, jam a paper clip into the scanner’s ‘enter’ button in an effort to slow it down. That, in turn, caused a short circuit that cut off the power, a company spokeswoman said.”
At first, before thousands of votes went “missing” (or perhaps were counted twice during the first go-round?), it appeared that the Florida 2018 Senate recount would be smoother than the 2000 Bush-Gore recount. The punch-card ballot system of 2000, with its “hanging” and “dimpled” chads, had been replaced with simple paper ballots that require voters to fill in a bubble next to the name of their preferred candidate. That makes it fairly easy to determine voter intent. During the manual recount of “over-votes” and “under-votes” (ballots in which the machines recorded more than one choice or no choice at all), images of disputed ballots were displayed by overhead projector. National and local journalists could tweet out photos of those ballots as they were being inspected, providing a previously impossible degree of transparency.
There were, of course, some reasonable legal disputes and overheated rhetoric. Several thousand mail-in ballots were rejected because the signature on the envelope did not match the signature on file with the state. A judge gave voters more time to prove their identities but that ruling didn’t change much.
Broward County, uniquely, took an extra two days to count all its votes (more than 80,000 after the polls closed). Supervisor Brenda Snipes would not say on election night, as required by Florida law, how many votes had been cast and how many remained to be counted. Rick Scott, in a November 8 statement, raised the possibility that there “may be rampant fraud happening in Palm Beach and Broward Counties.” Florida law provides for representatives of both political parties to be present during the counting of votes, and the Scott campaign alleged that Palm Beach (but not Broward) had failed to grant party representatives proper access. But there was no evidence of rampant voter fraud—a time-consuming conspiracy that would require the participation of many people.
Scott was castigated for raising the possibility of “rampant fraud,” and he shouldn’t have done it without evidence. But the reason the law requires election officials to say how many people have voted and how many votes are left to be counted is to prevent fraud and instill confidence that fraud is not occurring. Broward’s Snipes never explained why it took so long to get through the initial vote count or why she had been unable or unwilling to say how many votes were left to be counted.
For all the criticisms that Scott and Republicans faced for undermining democracy by raising the possibility that the election could be “stolen,” local officials bear far more blame for undermining confidence in democracy by failing to conduct recounts that could be trusted. The only thing that kept the 2018 Florida Senate recount looking more like an amusing fiasco than a full-scale crisis is the fact that Rick Scott’s margin of 10,000 votes was large enough that the discrepancies in Broward, Hillsborough, and Palm Beach weren’t enough to affect the outcome of the race. If the Senate race had come down to several hundred votes, like the 2000 presidential race in Florida, no one can be sure how the “missing” votes would have been accounted for.
The good news is that Brenda Snipes announced her resignation last week. Florida legislators will likely look at ways to make their state’s elections and recounts run more smoothly. But it’s hard to outlaw the stupidity or incompetence that would lead an election worker to jam a paper clip into a vote-counting machine. If the 2020 presidential election comes down to a recount in one state, pray it isn’t Florida.
