


Who will represent Florida in the U.S. Senate for the next six years likely will be decided by the examination of thousands of ballots in Broward County that initially recorded no votes in the Senate race.

"Undervotes," where a voter opts not to choose any candidate in a race do happen, but rarely in such high profile races. In fact, the first race to appear on a ballot — in this case, the Senate race — generally draws the highest number of votes.

But in Broward, just 683,963 votes have been reported in the Senate race compared with 708,955 in the governor's race.

Some of that difference could be explained by the enthusiasm of supporters of Democrat gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum. But the other statewide races for attorney general, chief financial officer and agriculture commissioner also showed thousands of more votes than the Senate race.

Elections experts say such an outcome is highly unusual.

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With Republican challenger Gov. Rick Scott leading Democratic incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson by just 12,562 votes, a recount examination of those undervotes could decide the outcome of the race.

There are two likely scenarios to explain the undervotes: Machine error or a poorly designed ballot that made it easy to overlook the Senate race.

The former would benefit Nelson; the latter, Scott.

If thousands of more people voted in Senate race, but faulty machines didn't tabulate those votes, those votes will be tallied in next week's recounts. Since Nelson captured 69 percent of the vote in Broward, such a move would likely cut deeply into Scott's lead and possibly flip it.

But the second possibility is the way the ballot was designed caused thousands of voters to overlook the Senate race.

The Senate race was the first one on the ballot and appeared in the lower left corner of the ballot just below the voting instructions. Many voters could have skipped over the Senate race thinking it was part of the instructions and proceeded directly to the governor's race, which was at the top of the center column of the ballot.

Bolstering that possibility is the voting patterns in the Broward portion of the 24th Congressional district, which also includes part of Miami-Dade County. 

Voters there had an even higher rate of undervotes than in other parts of the county.

Since the congressional race in the district was uncontested it didn't appear on the ballot leaving the Senate race the sole contest in the lower left hand corner of the ballot, potentially making it even easier to overlook.

If the recount finds that there truly were no votes cast in that race, it seems highly unlikely that the Nelson would be able to make up enough votes to overcome Scott's lead.

State law requires an automatic machine recount of ballots in races where the margin of victory is within 0.5 percentage points. The preliminary totals reported to the state have Scott leading by 0.15 percentage points.

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In a machine recount, all ballots are fed into high-speed tabulating machines to double-check the initial reported vote tallies. Machine recounts have to be completed by Thursday. 

If the Broward undervote was caused by machine errors, that would likely be caught by the machine recount. If the machine recount shows a margin higher than 0.25 percent, that is the end of the process and whoever has the most votes at the point would win, barring any lawsuits that might question the process.

If the machine recount produces a margin within 0.25 percent, election officials go forward with a hand recount.

Any manual recount doesn't mean that election officials would look at each of the more than 8 million ballots cast in the state. Instead, they would be examining ballots that tabulation machines said had "overvotes" or "undervotes" in the contested race.

An overvote occurs when the tabulating machine believes a voter cast more than one vote in a certain race. In some cases, voters do fill out more than one bubble for a race. Such "true" overvotes are not counted.

But sometimes a stray pen mark or other voter error can cause the tabulation machines to register an overvote. In such cases, where the voter intent is clear from the ballot, the vote is counted.

Still, it has hard to imagine a scenario where Nelson would be able to close a gap of more than 12,000 votes based on such voter errors.

The manual recount must be completed by Nov. 18.

Contact McCarthy at 321-752-5018 or

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