According to CNN, Palm Beach County officials are now saying there’s no way they can finish the recount by Thursday’s deadline, which will, according to Palm Beach county GOP chair Michael Barnett, put the GOP in very good position because their candidates are ahead. Not completing the recount means the Florida secretary of state would determine whether to certify the results as they are,. The Florida Sec. of State, Ken Detzner, is GOP.
It’s deja vu all over again.
Why would a state have a recount deadline that can’t be met?
Jesus H. Christ, this 2018 why can’t they have a system that works? There’s seriously something wrong in Florida politics. This is really over the line. The Fed needs to send people down there to monitor elections.
The key now is whether or not they’re forced to stop recounting, even if it’s after the deadline and won’t be accepted without some future ruling otherwise.
There are such piddly problems everywhere, but there are not many counties in the US as crucial in a swing state as the contiguous counties of Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach, which have a larger (very Dem heavy) population than the rest of the state combined. Problem is, the state capitol is up north and has been historically dominated by Republicans.
Let’s just say the instinct to disenfranchise the “center of resistance” that is South Florida was on full display with the predictable venomous reactions from Scott and Desantis.
Agreed. Because there are people (the GOP) who benefit from disenfranchising a subset of voters (minorities and those who will vote for Democrats).
Of course, as the usual contingent of (supposed) lawyers will tell us, this is perfectly okay because it is legal.
Mostly for no other reason than because it is Florida. Any other state that has gone through the bullshit Florida has with counting votes over the last 18 years would have taken action.
No, they have paper ballots - fill in the oval type. Scantron, I think it’s called.
As for why it’s taking so long, that CNN article linked to above says that volunteers in Pam Beach County are using eight machines. Another CNN article here shows the by county vote count in Florida for Senate in Palm Beach county - a combined total of 588,562 votes. So over four days, each machine will have to count almost 18,400 votes, or 766/hour.
The people who remain in control, benefit from a broken system, so it is working as intended. If it started to benefit Democrats, they’d want to change it.
My point was that they were able to run all of these ballots through the machine on election night in a matter of hours. Why can they not just do the same process again in the next four days?
Surprise, it takes longer for the most populated counties to gather and count (and even longer to recount) all their votes than it does for the low population counties to do so. For obvious reasons, there will be more problems and any problems will involve larger numbers and will be even more amplified during any close, important elections. That the most populous counties are Democratic leaning just makes it both natural and convenient for the desperate attempts to disenfranchise them to the greatest extent they can get away with.
Again, Florida state politics is and has been absolutely dominated by Republicans, yet there are many more Democrats living in Florida than there are Republicans, which would have no chance at all if all the Democrats actually voted and had those votes counted. Florida has a lot of electoral votes and they’re up for grabs. That’s all the plot you really need to know to guess the whole story.
Not sure about that - I think that belongs with the manual recount that would be triggered if the machine recount is within X%*
In the video linked to in the first post, the anchor asks the same question UltraVires does. The reply is that each election must be segregated from the others, a much more “laborious process”. Go to about 1:40 for the reporter’s explanation. (So I don’t have to retype it… :D)
Basically, it boils down to having to do three independent recounts - one each for Senate, Governor, and Agriculture Commissioner.
That’s both true and different than what I’m talking about. Close elections have automatic recounts, but particular ballots with particular aberrations (undervotes, overvotes, signature mismatch, etc.) have to be inspected manually.
First, all the other counties can meet the deadline. And most years, Palm Beach handles vote counting just fine. For some reason they had some foulups this year, as did Broward.
Second, recounts are BS. Running ballots through the machine once gives one result, running them through a second time gives a different result. There is no evidence that result #2 is more accurate than result #1. It’s all kabuki to make voters think that their one vote can make a difference, when the reality is that elections have a margin of error. Invalid ballots get included in totals, valid ballots get lost, mistakes occur during counting. When an election is close enough, there is literally no way to determine the intent of the voters. It’s a tie, and recounts are just a sophisticated way to do a coin flip.
That being said, Rick Scott is ahead by 12,000 votes, and no recount has ever flipped that many votes, or even come close. It’s over.