LAUDERHILL, Fla. _ As hundreds of volunteers and attorneys plowed through ballots, and protesters and politicians caviled from the sidelines, Florida's hand recount of its Senate race got underway Friday morning and almost immediately appeared to be a bust for Democrats.
The process hasn't been so great for democracy, either.
The quirks and imperfections the vote count has highlighted _ standard in most election systems _ were exploited over the past 10 days by lawmakers and by a president who doesn't seem to worry about accurately describing the fundamentals of ballot counting.
The comments by President Donald Trump and other Republicans seem likely to shake voter confidence in the election system in a manner that could endure into the next national election, elevating worries about what could happen if the 2020 presidential contest comes down to the wire.
Republicans had been in a near panic about the possibility of a hotly contested Senate seat slipping away here. But their worries faded as the hand recount sped along in Broward County, just north of Miami. It was there that more than 30,000 ballots in the race between incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat, and Republican Gov. Rick Scott seemed to have the potential to erase Scott's very narrow lead.
But as vote counters examined the ballots one by one, the vast majority were not disputable. In almost all of them, voters just left the Senate race blank. The count went so fast that election officials sent volunteers home before lunch.
Experts say the failure of so many voters to weigh in on a top-of-the ticket race likely was a result of a poorly designed ballot. But there's nothing Democrats can do about that now.
Although Nelson's lawyers still have some arguments to make, Democrats have said all along that their chances of winning depended heavily on uncovering a problem in Broward that would result in more votes for them.
"This is all but over folks," Michael McDonald, an elections expert at the University of Florida, wrote in a tweet.
