There was a 3 p.m. Nov. 15 deadline to finish a statewide machine recount of more than 8 million ballots in Senate, governor, agriculture commission races.
The state-mandated recount of more than 8 million ballots showed little change in three contested statewide races.
The U.S. Senate and agriculture commissioner's race are now headed toward hand recounts. The race for governor is all but over unless courts intervene.
While the numbers of votes changed slightly, the percentage margins remained the same as Saturday's first unofficial statewide tally. The new results do not include results from Palm Beach County, which did not complete its recount by the 3 p.m. deadline.
Nor did it include Broward County, which completed the recount on time but was two minutes too late filing results with the state.
By law, the numbers both counties filed with the state Saturday stand.
Nelson's lawyer filed a lawsuit in Leon County asking that all of the 600,000 ballots in Palm Beach be recounted by hand.
With the governor's margin outside the 0.25 percentage point margin needed for a hand recount, that race is all but over barring some extraordinary intervention from the courts.
There still are votes to be counted: Election officials can continue to count overseas ballots until Friday. And a federal judge opened the door for voters whose mail or provisional ballots had been rejected because of signature problems to get them counted until Saturday. But the uncounted ballots are likely too few to change a race where DeSantis leads Gillum by more than 30,000 votes.
The machine recount in Broward County — where incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson hopes to gain a sizable amount of ground on Gov. Rick Scott — showed little change.
The original results released By Broward on Saturday in the Senate race showed Democratic incumbent Nelson with 471,334 votes, compared to Scott's 211,119. After the recount, the candidates lost votes — Nelson had 469,949 votes and Scott had 210,513 votes.
Both counts gave Nelson about 69 percent of the vote, marking no real change for the senator who hopes to overcome Scott's statewide lead of about 12,600 votes.
The Nelson campaign has pointed to some 25,000 "undervotes" as something that could flip early election results.
"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 Elias believes there is still a machine error of some sort accounting for the apparent undervotes and that the hand examination will show that.
“That will narrow the margin, and very well may overturn it altogether," Elias said in a phone conference with reporters.
Election officials will now begin the process of examining Senate and agriculture commissioner ballots that show undervotes or overvotes, where machines detected more than one vote.
It was not immediately clear how many such ballots there are to be counted. The deadline to complete the hand recount is noon Sunday.
Palm Beach Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher said despite a "heroic effort," the county did not have time to complete the task.
She blamed old, faulty equipment that has faltered throughout the recount process for missing the deadline.
A federal judge earlier in the day refused to suspend the election recount deadlines.
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker on Thursday rejected a request by Nelson and Democrats to give counties more time to finish recounts.
In a six-page order filed Thursday afternoon, Walker said he could not offer relief because of "a complete dearth of evidence" concerning the progress or expected completion of the recounts in Palm Beach County.
Earlier Thursday, Walker issued a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit filed by Nelson over ballots thrown out because of mismatched signatures — declaring a state law unconstitutional and offering a middle path to give voters a few days to correct their ballots.
Walker said voters whose ballots were rejected should have until 5 p.m. Saturday to go to their local elections office to verify that they, in fact, had signed the ballots.
Lawyers representing Scott immediately filed a notice of appeal with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. The appeals court Thursday afternoon declined to stay Walker's order or to schedule an emergency hearing on the matter.
In any case, those affidavits could only affect vote totals if Walker's decision to extend the deadline to file "cure forms" until Saturday stands.
Keith told the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida she was aware the deadline to submit those forms had expired, even though she was telling them there was still time to fix their absentee ballots. She then directed people to email Katharine Priegues, a field organizer with the Florida Democratic Party, with the subject line "I want to help" for instructions on what to do.
"I was trying to show that, if given notice, voters would try to fix their ballots," Keith said. "I was putting the word out because I was anticipating a challenge of that deadline (in court)."
That same day, however, state Democratic Party Chair Terrie Rizzo wrote on a private Facebook page efforts to fix ballots should be focused on provisional ballots, which were handled separately with a Nov. 8 deadline for voters to fix any issues.
In open court earlier, Walker, the federal judge overseeing many of the recount lawsuits, pulled no punches as he placed the blame clearly on the state for Florida’s latest electoral turmoil.