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Workers pull long days in Florida's election recount

Published  November 12, 2018 10:23pm EST
News
FOX 13 Tampa Bay

TAMPA, Fla. (FOX 13) - All eyes were on board of elections offices Monday as workers continued to recount votes in Florida's governor and U.S. Senate races.

The margins in both races are less than half a percent, triggering the recount. 

"We started at 9:00 this morning. We're going through a lot of ballots. We've got over 527,000 ballots that we'll be processing in this recount," said Craig Latimer, Hillsborough County's Supervisor of Elections.

A cloud of uncertainty hangs over the process. Gov. Rick Scott, who leads Democratic candidate Bill Nelson in the Senate race, has accused Democrats of "rampant voter fraud" in Broward County.

President Trump weighed in again Monday morning, tweeting, "many ballots are missing or forged."

While the criticism is directed at Broward and Palm Beach Counties, which were still counting votes days after Election Day, Polk County Supervisor of Elections Lori Edwards responded.

"What I say is, if they have any, any indication of evidence of any fraud, they should bring it," Edwards said. "A recount is not a bad thing. A recount is not a screw up. A recount is nothing to make fun of or complain about."

Edwards also requested Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd deploy two deputies -- a registered Republican and a registered Democrat -- to oversee the recount in order to "make sure that things will be calm."

Latimer took a more neutral stance, saying he's solely focused on counting votes by the Thursday deadline.

"There's politics and there's elections. My office runs elections," he said. "Right now we're going 12 hours a day, we may go longer. We're going to evaluate where we are each day and see if we need to add more hours or what we need to do."

The ballots are run through the tallying machines, and the ones in which voters didn't vote in a race or made multiple choices in a race will be separated. These are known as "under-voting" or "over-voting," respectively. If the races end up with margins of less than 25 percent, those ballots will be hand-counted.