Broward County once again proves that incompetence and ineptitude are the heart of their election process. Throughout this whole process, the county, a Democratic bastion, and it’s equally disastrous and liberal neighbor, Palm Beach County, have made a mockery of the 2018 election with their inability to count the friggin’ ballots. Republican Gov. Rick Scott had to file lawsuits in order to shed some light into their ballot counting processes, which a judge later found to be in violation of public records laws. They wouldn’t disclose how many outstanding ballots were left. Scott had declared victory over incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson. Scott still holds a razor thin lead of a little over 12,000 votes; close enough to trigger a mandatory machine recount and now the hand recount. And this is where we enter ‘you can’t make this up’ territory. On day two of the hand recount, the process had to be stopped because Broward was counting the wrong ballots. Luckily, they caught this error just in time before some serious issues could have arisen, like double counting ballots, but it doesn’t negate the fact that Broward’s Election Day operations are a total disaster (via Fox News):
Fresh off its bungled machine recount, Broward County’s second day of manual recounting temporarily stopped about an hour after it began Saturday when lawyers from both political parties pointed out that volunteers were counting the wrong ballots.
Hundreds of volunteers spent most of Friday sorting through 32,000 overvotes and undervotes in the Senate race between incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson and Republican Gov. Rick Scott. Broward officials announced Friday night they had finished their manual recount.
On Saturday, the volunteers started sorting about 22,000 undervotes and overvotes in the contentious contest for Florida Commissioner of Agriculture.
That came to a grinding halt when lawyers found thousands of overlapping ballots which clearly showed a vote in the agriculture race but were fuzzy in the Senate race.
“It appears there may have been some ballots from yesterday mixed in with the ones for today,” Broward Canvassing Board Judge Deborah Carpenter-Toye told reporters.
Forty-seven manila envelopes from the Senate recount were mixed in with the envelopes distributed for the commissioner race.
Broward County Canvassing Board Attorney Rene Harrod told Fox News the issue was caught in time and that none of the 47 envelopes made it to the canvassing board. It’s an important catch because it rules out the possibility of some votes being counted twice.
Let’s also not forget that Broward missed the machine deadline…by two minutes, which discounted their results. The original unofficial results were used instead.
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UPDATE: Well, this nightmare is over. As Cortney wrote, Nelson has conceded.
BREAKING: Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson ends re-election bid after decades in Congress, concedes to Republican Rick Scott
— The Associated Press (@AP) November 18, 2018