Washington Times By Sean Sullivan ,Beth Reinhard and Amy Gardner 11/15/2018
TALLAHASSEE — Florida’s historic recount was thrown once more into uncertainty Thursday when a federal judge ruled that at least 4,000 voters whose mail-in and provisional ballots were rejected because of issues with their signatures may be given two days to resolve the problem and have their votes counted.
The decision by Judge Mark Walker of the U.S. District Court in Tallahassee came hours ahead of the Thursday afternoon deadline for elections officials to complete a machine recount. Early Thursday, officials in Broward County finished their count and prepared to release a new vote total for Florida’s second-largest jurisdiction.
It was not clear how the judge’s decision would affect the timing of recount, which was expected to move to a manual canvass Friday in the too-close-to-call Senate race, in which Gov. Rick Scott (R) leads Sen. Bill Nelson (D) by fewer than 13,000 votes.
The decision affects Floridians who cast mail-in ballots, or voted provisionally, but whose signatures did not match records maintained by state officials. More than 4,000 ballots across 45 counties in Florida were set aside because of inconsistent signatures, he wrote in his opinion. In the other 22 counties, the number is unknown.
While the ruling gives Nelson new hope for chipping away at his deficit, it falls short of the more sweeping decision his lawyers sought and is probably not enough to change the outcome of the race on its own. The judge, in a decision released early Thursday morning, stopped short of invalidating the signature-match requirement, concluding instead that the directive had been applied unlawfully because so many voters were given no chance to fix their rejected ballots and prove their identity. He also declined Nelson’s demand that all the mismatched ballots be counted “sight unseen,†as the judge put it.
Drawing an analogy to the rules governing football, he declined to throw out the regulation just because there had been a faulty call, observing, “Football fans may quibble about the substance of the rules, but no one quibbles that rules are necessary to play the game.â€
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/florida-recount-signatures-judge-ballot-machine-count-deadline/2018/11/15/21275a22-e87c-11e8-bbdb-72fdbf9d4fed_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4ab162e1be27
