When the counting stops

Nearly 3,000 votes effectively disappeared during the machine recount of Florida’s midterm races, according to election records, calling into question whether officials relied on a flawed process to settle the outcome of three statewide contests.

[...]

In one of the most serious cases, Palm Beach County found “dozens of precincts missing a significant number” of votes during the machine recount, according to the supervisor of elections, Susan Bucher, causing the county to conclude that entire boxes of ballots may not have been counted.

Ms. Bucher blamed an overheated and outdated ballot-scanning machine. But the manufacturer of the high-speed scanner used in Palm Beach said its technicians had witnessed Palm Beach County elections workers, apparently worried that one of the machines was running too fast, jam a paper clip into the scanner’s “enter” button in an effort to slow it down. That, in turn, caused a short circuit that cut off the power, a company spokeswoman said.

  NYT

Are they just extra stupid in Florida's election system, or is this part of the Florida way?

So serious were the problems that the county was unable to complete its machine recount on time and its results were not included in the state vote totals on Thursday. Whatever discrepancies it had were not part of the nearly 3,000 votes missing in the machine recount total.

Two power failures in Hillsborough County appear to have caused the recount there to come up nearly 850 votes short of the original tally, local officials said. Rather than submit numbers he knew were incorrect, the elections supervisor said he had scrapped the results. Miami-Dade County was short about 500 votes, state records show.

[...]

Florida is scheduled to certify results in the races for governor, Senate and agriculture commissioner on Nov. 20. All three races went to an automatic machine recount last week when the results of an initial tally, reported Nov. 10, showed that their margins fell within 0.5 percentage points. After that, a manual recount was ordered in the Senate and agriculture races when the machine recount showed the margins were less than 0.25 percentage points.

It was in the total results reported from the initial tally on Nov. 10 and the results of the machine recount reported on Saturday that the discrepancies in the total number of votes showed up.

The difference in Broward County was 0.29 percent — higher than the margin between the candidates in both the Senate and agriculture commissioner’s races.

“This is a big deal,” said E. John Sebes, founder of Open Source Election Technology, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that promotes accuracy and security in the vote-counting process. “If you have an election margin of 0.21 percent and a variance of 0.12 percent, the variance of your machine count is half the margin you are trying to correct. That’s kooky.”

It wasn’t only missing votes that raised questions about Florida’s election results. The vote count in heavily Democratic Broward County increased by about 80,000 in the four days after the election, possibly because of mail-in, provisional, overseas and military ballots that come in late and were legally counted after Election Day.

[...]

Noteworthy to outside election experts were the variances in vote tallies, which effectively meant that thousands of votes weren’t counted.

“If I were a campaign, I’d be yelling and screaming,” said Charles Stewart III, director of the Election Data and Science Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I’d want a hand recount of every single ballot.”

And if Al Gore had done that in 2000 instead of letting George W Bush and the Supreme Court steal that election, we might have a very different world today. He let the whole world down.

“Florida tried to clean up its act [after the 2000 debacle], and this was the first time it was put to the test,” Mr. Stewart said. “I would hope wiser heads in Florida would take a deep breath and say, ‘O.K., we can do better next time.’”

Do they have wiser heads?

When the machine recount in Hillsborough County came up 846 votes short of the number originally counted, Craig Latimer, the supervisor of elections, said he tossed the results of the machine recount and let the original tally stand.

“Even though we achieved 99.84 percent success in our recount effort, we are not willing to accept that votes go unreported,” Mr. Latimer said in a statement.

Uhhhh...no possibility it went the other way? Too many ballots cast the first time? Or, how about, HEY, there's a bunch of ballots missing! Nope. Just scrap it.

He stressed that the margin between the candidates had remained constant, even with the missing votes.

Sure, why not?

In Broward County, an elections official said that 2,000 ballots had been “co-mingled.”

“We did not correctly handle the ballots,” said Joseph D’Alessandro, head of operations there. “We are going to look into that and see what took place.”

Miami-Dade did not return a request for comment.

There's the wise heads.

In Palm Beach, the elections supervisor, Ms. Bucher, said the count was eventually reconciled, but it did not matter: The county missed the deadline to submit its numbers. She blamed the machine used, which she said overheated, and she disputed the manufacturer’s account that no technicians had been called about what she said had been an overheating problem.

“We have no reports of an overheating system that night,” said Kay Stimson, vice president of government affairs for Dominion Voting, one of two companies certified to provide the ballot counting machines in Florida. “The motors shipped there to be on hand are still in the box.”

Teresa Paulsen, spokeswoman for ES & S, the other company, said machine recounts depend on the same number of ballots being entered into the system. Some ballots could have been torn or damaged after the election, which could have cause a different result in the recount, she said.

The machines that were used in the recount are normally used to count absentee ballots. The machines at the precincts used on election night are more accurate, Mr. Stewart said.

[...]

“A close recount is going to expose all the warts you have in election system,” [Michael McDonald, an elections expert at the University of Florida] said. “It’s an election administrator’s prayer to not have a close election, so those warts are not revealed.”

How would we feel if our accountants took this very lax and arbitrary attitude?

Barry Richard, a lawyer for Andrew Gillum, the Democratic candidate for governor who came within 33,000 votes after the machine recount in his race against the former Republican congressman, Ron DeSantis, said the amount of lost votes would not have been enough for his candidate to win.

“What it tells us is, these machines are not perfect,” Mr. Richard said. “We know people are not perfect. We particularly know that people in Broward are not perfect.”

I think it's pretty screwy that in national elections, various states can use various voting methods and have various rules. Although these were state results, there needs to be a standard method for the vote every four years, so why not just have a standard method? Which states have the least problematic elctions? That could give us a pattern. Or, perhaps it's time to go back to paper ballots, dump the machines, and not be in such a damned hurry to find out who won.

Meanwhile, in Georgia...

Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams has vowed to sue the [...] state of Georgia for "gross mismanagement" of the gubernatorial election after withdrawing from the race.

Abrams, who aimed to become the country's first black woman governor, on Friday acknowledged at a news conference that she had lost an election to Republican Brian Kemp, accusing him of voter suppression.

"Let be clear, this is not a speech of concession because concession means to acknowledge an action is right true or proper ... I cannot concede that," she said.

[...]

Kemp's victory is an important marker for Republicans ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Kemp's narrow margin already suggests that Georgia, a state Trump won by five percentage points in 2016, could be a genuine battleground in two years.

  alJazeera

Which means they'll have to double down on voter suppression.