Tag Archives: ballots

Hand recount ordered in Florida’s divisive U.S. Senate race

FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: U.S. Senator Bill Nelson speaks in Orlando, Florida, U.S., June 12, 2016 and Florida Governor Rick Scott appears in Washington, DC, U.S., September 29, 2017 respectively. REUTERS/Kevin Kolczynski and REUTERS/Joshua Roberts/File Photos/File Photo

By Letitia Stein

TAMPA, Fla. (Reuters) – Florida election officials on Thursday ordered a hand recount of ballots in the closely fought U.S. Senate race between Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson and his Republican challenger, Governor Rick Scott after a machine recount showed them divided by a razor-thin margin.

But in another tight contest, Republican Ron DeSantis appeared to secure the Florida governor’s seat against Democrat Andrew Gillum when the electronic recount showed DeSantis with a 0.41 percentage point lead, outside the threshold to trigger further recount.

Under state law, the Florida Department of State must trigger a manual recount if an electronic recount of ballots finds a margin of victory less than 0.25 percent.

Gillum, who initially conceded on election night but then reversed course, signaled that he had not yet given up.

“A vote denied is justice denied — the State of Florida must count every legally cast vote,” Gillum said in a statement after the machine recount concluded.

In the Senate race, Nelson trailed Scott by about 12,600 votes, or 0.15 percent of the more than 8 million ballots cast following an electronic recount of ballots in the Nov. 6 election, the state said.

The electronic recount suffered glitches as liberal-leaning Palm Beach County failed to complete the process by Thursday’s deadline due to machine problems. Nelson’s team said it had filed a lawsuit seeking a hand recount of all ballots in the county.

In the next stage of the recount, Florida counties face a deadline of noon E.T. on Sunday to submit their election results – including a manual recount of undervotes or overvotes, cases where the machine that reviewed the ballot concluded a voter had skipped a contest or marked more than one selection.

If the voter’s intentions are clear on review by a person, the ballot could be counted.

Overall control of the U.S. Senate is not at stake in the Florida race. President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans held their majority in the chamber while Democrats took a majority in the House of Representatives.

But both the Senate and governor’s races were closely scrutinized as Florida is traditionally a key swing state in presidential elections.

Florida’s close races and legal disputes over the validity of votes have stirred memories of the 2000 U.S. presidential election when the U.S. Supreme Court stopped an ongoing recount in the state and sent George W. Bush to the White House.

The Scott campaign called on Nelson to concede. “Last week, Florida voters elected me as their next U.S. Senator and now the ballots have been counted twice,” Scott said in a statement.

But Nelson attorney Marc Elias said he expected the margin between the two candidates to shrink and “ultimately disappear entirely.”

U.S. District Judge Mark Walker in Tallahassee, Florida, separately ordered election authorities to allow voters a chance to fix signature issues on an estimated 5,000 ballots that were rejected by officials. A Georgia federal judge issued a similar ruling as that state worked to resolve a close governor’s race.

Along with the hand recount, Nelson’s supporters have asked the court to allow mail-in ballots to count if they were postmarked before the election yet arrived too late.

The Democrats’ majority in the new House expanded by another seat on Thursday when the Maine Secretary of State’s office declared Jared Golden the winner of a race against incumbent Republican Representative Bruce Poliquin. That race represented an early test of a new state ranked-choice voting system, designed to prevent candidates in races with three or more contenders from winning office without majority support.

‘LAUGHING STOCK’

Walker grew testy during a series of Thursday hearings about lawsuits over the recounts, voicing frustration uneven recount progress in different counties and also the Florida legislature’s response to historic election problems.

“We have been the laughing stock of the world election after election,” Walker said. “But we’ve still chosen not to fix this.”

Separately, a federal judge in Georgia on Wednesday ordered state election officials to count some previously rejected ballots in that state’s governor’s race, where ballots are still being tallied but Republican former Secretary of State Brian Kemp has declared victory over Democrat Stacey Abrams.

This year’s campaigns went down as the most expensive midterm elections in U.S. history, with some $5.25 billion spent on advertising, up 78 percent from the last midterm elections in 2014, according to a Kantar Media analysis released on Thursday. Spending was 20 percent higher than the 2016 presidential election.

(Reporting by Letitia Stein, writing by Scott Malone; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Iraqi ballot box storage site catches fire in Baghdad

Smoke rises from a storage site in Baghdad, housing ballot boxes from Iraq's May parliamentary election, Iraq June 10, 2018. REUTERS/Khalid al-Mousily

By Ahmed Aboulenein

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A storage site housing half of Baghdad’s ballot boxes from Iraq’s parliamentary election in May caught fire on Sunday, just days after parliament demanded a nationwide recount of votes, drawing calls for the election to be re-run.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi described the fire as a “plot” aimed at Iraq’s democracy.

The timing of the fire undermined the results of an election whose validity was already in doubt. Fewer than 45 percent of voters cast a ballot, a record low, and allegations of fraud began almost immediately after the vote.

“Burning election warehouses … is a plot to harm the nation and its democracy. We will take all necessary measures and strike with an iron fist all who undermine the security of the nation and its citizens,” Abadi said in a statement.

Experts would conduct an investigation and prepare a detailed report on how the fire started, he said.

An Interior Ministry spokesman said the fire was confined to one of four warehouses at the site. State television said ballot boxes were moved to another location under heavy security.

Interior Minister Qasim al-Araji later told a local television channel that “not a single box was burned.”

Abadi, whose electoral alliance came third in the election, had said on Tuesday that a government investigation had found serious violations and blamed Iraq’s independent elections commission for most of them.

Parliament mandated a full manual recount the next day. The Independent High Elections Commission had used electronic vote- counting devices to tally the results.

A recount could undermine nationalist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a long-time adversary of the United States whose bloc won the largest number of seats in the election. One of Sadr’s top aides expressed concern that some parties were trying to sabotage the cleric’s victory.

CALLS FOR RE-RUN

Salim al-Jabouri, the outgoing speaker of parliament, said the fire showed the election should be repeated.

“The crime of burning ballot-box storage warehouses in the Rusafa area is a deliberate act, a planned crime, aimed at hiding instances of fraud and manipulation of votes, lying to the Iraqi people and changing their will and choices,” he said in a statement.

Jabouri narrowly lost his seat in May and had been one of the strongest proponents of a recount before the fire.

Opponents of the recount, mostly those whose blocs did well in the election, point out that many who voted for it were lawmakers who lost their seat. Sadr’s bloc boycotted the parliamentary session in which the vote took place.

Jabouri’s call was seconded by Vice President Iyad Allawi, the leader of the electoral alliance Jabouri ran as part of.

Top Sadr aide Dhiaa al-Asadi said the fire was a plot aimed at forcing a repeat of the election and hiding fraud.

“Whoever burned the election equipment and document storage site had two goals: either cancelling the election or destroying the stuffed ballots counted amongst the results,” he tweeted.

The fire took place at a Trade Ministry site in Baghdad where the election commission stored the ballot boxes from al-Rusafa, the half of Baghdad on the eastern side of the Tigris river. Baghdad is Iraq’s most populous province, accounting for 71 seats out of the Iraqi parliament’s 329.

JUDICIAL TAKEOVER

The site was divided into four warehouses, said Interior Ministry spokesman Major General Saad Maan. Only one – housing electronic equipment and documents – had burned down, he said.

Firefighters stopped the fire from spreading to the remaining three warehouses, where the ballot boxes are stored, he said.

The law mandating a manual recount also mandated the board of the election commission be replaced by judges. Earlier on Sunday, the Supreme Judicial Council, Iraq’s highest judicial authority, named the judges who will take over replace the commissioners.

The council also named judges to replace the commission’s local chiefs in each of Iraq’s 18 provinces, another measure mandated by parliament.

The board of commissioners has said it would appeal against the law forcing the recount.

Its chairman a statement late on Sunday said all of the electronic vote counting and voter identification equipment had been lost in the fire but that ballot boxes were safe.

“The fire does not affect the election results,” Maan al-Hetawi said, because it had kept copies of the paper tallies produced by the vote counting devices in a separate location.

“The commission today is targeted from all sides … we call on all constitutional institutions in the country and the leaders of all political blocs to do their historic duty and preserve the results of the electoral process,” he said.

(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; additional reporting by Huda Majeed; editing by Larry King and Sandra Maler)

U.S. voters look to game election system by ‘trading’ ballots

A voter wears a shirt with words from the United States Constitution while casting his ballot early as long lines of voters vote at the San Diego County Elections Office in San Diego, California,

By Joseph Ax

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Sophy Warner wanted to vote for third-party U.S. presidential candidate Jill Stein. But she worried that her ballot, cast in the swing state of Ohio, might help Republican Donald Trump capture the White House.

Through the website “Trump Traders,” the 20-year-old biology student at Cleveland State University got in touch with Marc Baluda, 44, a Republican corporate lawyer in California who opposes Trump’s candidacy and planned to vote for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

The two strange bedfellows made a deal worthy of congressional horse-trading: Warner would vote for Clinton in Ohio, where polls show a tight race, while Baluda would cast a ballot for the Green Party candidate Stein in California, where Clinton is assured of winning the state’s electoral votes.

Tens of thousands of voters, the vast majority seeking to prevent a Trump presidency, have signed up on “vote-swapping” exchanges in advance of Tuesday’s Election Day. There is no way to verify the ballots are cast as agreed, though some people are taking “ballot selfies” in states where such photos are legal.

The swaps take advantage of a unique feature of U.S. presidential elections. The winner is decided not by the national popular vote. Rather, the outcome depends on what are known as electoral votes, which are awarded to the victor of each state’s presidential election, with rare exception.

The overall electoral vote winner becomes president, and the national contest thus often comes down to votes in a handful of states.

“Swing states” such as Ohio are hotly contested because their voters can swing either to Republicans or Democrats year after year and so play a decisive role. By contrast, pollsters view states such as California as reliably Democratic.

40,000 MATCHES

Trump Traders had matched 40,000 voters as of Monday, according to co-founder John Stubbs. Although that may be a small fraction of the electorate, a few hundred votes could make a difference in a state where the race is close.

The practice appears to be legal. In 2007, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that swapping votes is a protected form of free speech, even if some disagreed with the tactic.

Vote trading first gained attention in 2000, when some voters sought to ensure Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, did not siphon off enough support from Democrat Al Gore to hand the election to Republican George W. Bush.

The so-called “Nader Traders” failed when Bush famously won the election after capturing Florida by only 537 votes. Nader drew more than 97,000 votes there.

Stein and Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson together are drawing nearly 7 percent in opinion polls, far more than normal for those parties and enough to raise the specter of another Nader-style outcome in 2016.

The digital exchanges seek to solve a quadrennial conundrum for voters “trapped” in one of the 40 or so noncompetitive states: how can I make my vote count?

For supporters of third-party candidates like Stein and Johnson who have almost no chance of capturing electoral votes, however, all that matters is their raw national totals.

That difference is what allows the type of vote trading that occurs on Trump Traders and #NeverTrump, a mobile app launched this fall by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Amit Kumar.

“Living in California, our votes aren’t that important in determining who wins,” he said in a phone interview.

Kumar said the app has been downloaded 20,000 times, with around 8,000 active users.

Trump Traders’ Stubbs, a Republican, said technology advances since 2000, including social networking sites and mobile phones, made vote-trading exponentially easier.

For Republican voters like Baluda, even saying aloud that he is supporting Clinton is difficult. But he said he had no regrets about trying to maximize the power of his vote by commoditizing it.

“Votes do matter, and Floridians found that out 16 years ago,” he said.

(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Howard Goller)