Florida’s Botched-Election History Spurs Bid to Make It a Model

Florida, known for its voting flubs and hanging chads since an excruciating recount in the 2000 presidential contest, has remade itself into a model of election efficiency for the Covid era of mail-in voting.

Votes cast at early-voting sites or via the mail there are already being loaded into counting equipment and most will have been tabulated as Election Day begins on Nov. 3. Computers are primed to spit out results almost as soon as polls close at 7 p.m.

That means it’s set to deliver results quickly — in contrast to other battlegrounds including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, where laws don’t let officials tally the stacks of mailed ballots until Election Day, possibly setting up days of tense counting.

“The mechanics of the process are going to work more smoothly in Florida than in other places,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, deputy director for voting rights at the Brennan Center, a New York-based policy group.

Other states, too, process early ballots and are set to report quickly once polls close, including North Carolina and Arizona. Analysts keep a close eye on Florida in presidential elections, both because of its bounty of electoral votes and the closeness of results that are often a bellwether of the outcome nationwide.

If the final result is really close, Florida could still be a problem. The Realclearpolitics.com average of polls show a race in Florida that is essentially tied, with President Donald Trump taking a very slight 0.4% lead over Democrat Joe Biden on Tuesday.

Florida law dictates a recount if the margin is half a percentage point or less. A very close contest could produce days of acrimony and lawsuits, as candidates launch accusations of impropriety. For instance, during a recount in 2018 Trump said an honest election wasn’t possible and Rick Scott–then the governor vying to be a U.S. senator–alleged attempts to “steal” the election.

Barring such a close contest, sufficient results to know the winner probably will be released by midnight, said Kathryn DePalo-Gould, a teaching professor of politics at Florida International University.

“If Biden wins Florida, I think it’s over and I think we’ll know very early,” DePalo-Gould said. “If Trump wins Florida, it’s game on” with the national outcome not clear until more states report.

In the tight presidential race in 2016, the Associated Press called Florida for Trump at 10:50 p.m.

A heavy turnout on Nov. 3 probably signals a Trump win, since Republicans in Florida usually outvote Democrats on Election Day, DePalo-Gourd said. Not all those same-day results would appear in the earliest returns.

With early votes already handled, elections workers in Florida’s 67 counties can spend Election Day handling the minority of voters who cast ballots that day in person, as well as the mailed ballots that arrive that day. A handful of other states are similarly well-positioned to report results on election day, including North Carolina and Arizona.

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“If this is going to be a problem, it’s probably not going to be in Florida,” said Steven Vancore, a spokesman for the elections supervisor in Broward County, which has 1.3 million registered voters and the city of Fort Lauderdale. “It’s going to be, I think, with a high degree of confidence, a bit of a ho-hum.”

Across the state, Hillsborough County also expects a smooth ride.

“Florida’s in a great position to be a shining star on election night,” said Craig Latimer, supervisor of elections for the county, the state’s fourth-largest and home to the city of Tampa.

“I have to release the first results within 30 minutes of the polls closing,” Latimer said in an interview. “We’re going to have, as we always have, unofficial results election night.”

In a year with more people voting by mail to avoid the pandemic, Florida has the advantage of experience. Voters haven’t needed an excuse to use the mail since 2002. More than 2 million have done so in each of the last two general elections. The process is so familiar as to be a custom, rather than a novelty: at least as far back as 2004, more than 1 million Floridians cast ballots by mail, according to state records.

An uneventful evening would help Florida shed its image as a hotbed of polling problems, earned in the 2000 recount that lasted weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and awarded the state’s electoral votes — and the presidency — to Republican George W. Bush by 537 votes.

Since then, the state has modernized voting equipment, eliminated troublesome ballots (such as the punch-card machines that yielded “hanging chads”) and expanded voting by mail.

Still, problems have surfaced.

In 2018, Broward County endured the chaotic two-week recount that elevated Scott to the U.S. Senate, and forced Bill Nelson into retirement by about 10,000 votes out of 8 million cast. Along the way, Nelson’s backers filed lawsuits to question why some ballots were discarded. Scott, Trump and Republican Senator Marco Rubio spoke of fraud.

In four earlier elections, from 2004 through 2016, elections in Broward County featured long lines and long vote counts after polls had closed, according to a report this year by the nonpartisan group Integrity Florida, a non-profit that says it works to promote integrity in government. It also cited trouble in Palm Beach County, erstwhile home to the butterfly ballot.

Mailed Ballots

This year, following a change of leadership, Broward reported 80% of the results from the general primary in August at 7:02 p.m., said Vancore.

Nearly 6 million Florida residents, or more than 40% of those registered to vote, have requested mailed ballots for the Nov. 3 election and almost 4 million have returned them, according to the U.S. Elections Project that tracks voting.

More than two-thirds of Florida voter plan to vote early, whether in person or by mail, leaving 29% of votes to be cast on election day, according to a survey by the Democracy Fund.

Efficiency doesn’t mean Florida elections lack issues. A voter-registration website crashed Oct. 5, prompting a federal just to write that Florida “has done it again” as he decided against intervening.

Florida requires ballots to arrive by 7 p.m. on Election Day, and doesn’t count ballots that may have been mailed by Nov. 3 and arrive in following days. That could disenfranchise some voters, said Morales-Doyle, with the Brennan Center.

Felons

Florida felons who are otherwise eligible to vote are blocked from casting ballots if they haven’t paid all their court fees and victim restitution.

Florida voters in 2018 lifted a ban on voting for more than 1 million felons who’d completed their sentences. But Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed into law a bill that imposed limits on the measure.

The action by DeSantis could unfairly deny voting rights to hundreds of thousands of citizens, civil rights groups argued before losing a legal battle against it.

Michael Bloomberg — who is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News — raised about $16 million with a Democratic-associated nonprofit to pay the outstanding costs owed by felons in the state. Trump derided the move and questioned its legality.

Trump himself is among the early voters in Florida.

He cast his ballot in person Oct. 24 in West Palm Beach. In a tweet he urged followers to use the method in Florida, telling them ballots were available and to “make sure to request yours.”

— With assistance by Jennifer Kay

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