US District Judge Mark Walker ruled that people in Florida have until 5PM ET on Saturday to verify their ballots after officials rejected them due to a signature mismatch.
While it is a blow to Republican Senate candidate Rick Scott, it’s not a full win for incumbent Democrat Sen. Bill Nelson since he asked the courts “to discard Florida’s signature match law.”
More than 4,000 people in 45 of the 67 counties in Florida could not vote because their signatures did not match with the ones on the state’s records. We do not know how many remain in the other 22 counties.
From The Wall Street Journal:
The judge’s order requires Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner to issue a directive to the 67 county election supervisors to give voters a chance to correct their ballots.“The precise issue in this case is whether Florida’s law that allows county election officials to reject vote-by-mail and provisional ballots for mismatched signatures—with no standards, an illusory process to cure, and no process to challenge the rejection—passes constitutional muster. The answer is simple. It does not,” the judge wrote in his order.
Scott’s campaign said they are “immediately appealing this baseless decision.”
It may not make much of a difference. I blogged about Marc Caputo’s article in Politico that put the numbers out front. Even if all these lawsuits go in favor of Nelson, the numbers are still against him.
Florida rejected 7,871 votes for “voter error,” including “mismatched signatures on the ballots compared to what’s on file with the state.” Out of those ballots:
Caputo wrote that “Nelson would have to win 85 percent of” the voter error and the rejected ballots that came in unsigned.
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