A machine recount of more than 8 million ballots has confirmed Republican Rep. Ron DeSantis’s victory over Democratic Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum in the governor’s race while the Senate race between Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott and Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson heads to an automatic hand recount.
DeSantis won by 33,684 votes, but Scott’s margin of 0.15 percent over Nelson is well below the 0.25 percent difference that automatically triggers a manual recount of under and over votes.
An example of an undervote is voting only for the U.S. Senate on the ballot. An overvote would be accidentally selecting more than one candidate in a particular race.
Scott is calling on Nelson to concede. The Florida Division of Elections showed Scott leading by 12,603 votes, an increase of 41 votes from the last pre-recount vote reported Sunday.
“Last week, Florida voters elected me as their next U.S. Senator and now the ballots have been counted twice. I am incredibly proud and humbled by the opportunity to serve Florida in Washington,” he said in a statement issued Thursday afternoon.
The outgoing governor said it’s time for Florida “to move forward.”
“We need to put this election behind us, and it is time for Bill Nelson to respect the will of the voters and graciously bring this process to an end rather than proceed with yet another count of the votes – which will yield the same result, and bring more embarrassment to the state that we both love and have served,” Scott said.
Nelson has not commented, but his campaign has called a press conference for early Thursday evening.
Meanwhile, Gillum said Thursday he won’t concede because of tens of thousands of votes were not tallied in the recount, the Hill reported.
“We plan to do all we can to ensure that every voice is heard in this process,” he said in a statement.
Broward County’s machine recount will not be used because the office submitted its results two minutes past the 3 p.m. deadline Thursday, which rolls official vote totals back to the pre-recount results.
Palm Beach County also missed the deadline.
However, Nelson is suing in federal court for a waiver of the deadline.
Palm Beach County’s ballot-counting machine malfunctions forced officials to recount about 175,000 votes. Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher had said the county would likely not complete the machine recount in time, the Hill reported.
She describing her office as being in “prayer mode.”
