Democrat Eliott Rodriguez, who is losing Miami's District 27 House race to Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar by 1,090 votes, has sued to remove Miami-Dade County's elections chief from the recount. Rodriguez says Supervisor of Elections Alina Garcia cannot be impartial: she has already declared Salazar "the winner, with or without a recount", and her son-in-law is Salazar's lawyer.
Florida's Department of State ordered the machine recount on Saturday after the first unofficial returns put Salazar at 124,528 votes, 50.22 percent, to Rodriguez's 123,438, 49.78 percent — a margin of 1,090 votes out of 247,966 cast, or 0.44 percent, inside the half of one percent that triggers an automatic machine recount under Florida law. If the margin after the machine recount falls to a quarter of one percent or less, a manual recount follows. The machine recount must be completed by 3 p.m. on Thursday, November 12; official county returns are due by noon on November 16, and the state certifies the results on November 17.
Rodriguez's complaint says that Garcia publicly announcing the result before any recount, while acknowledging that a reversal remained possible, creates an objective risk of prejudgment by the decision-maker herself. His campaign sent Garcia a letter on Thursday demanding that she recuse herself, and she refused. The lawsuit asks a court to remove her, claiming that her involvement in the recount violates his Fourteenth Amendment due process rights. Garcia's son-in-law, Robert Fernandez, is Salazar's attorney.
Salazar has called the move an attempt to undermine the count. Garcia and her son-in-law both deny that a conflict of interest exists.
Garcia's role is not ceremonial. As the county's elections chief she sits on the canvassing board that oversees the recount and makes the close decisions — whether signatures match on provisional and mail ballots, and whether the voting machines made tabulation errors. In a race separated by 0.44 percent, those decisions can move the margin.
For the nearly 248,000 voters of District 27, the fight is about who they can trust to run the second count of their ballots: a recount only settles a close race if both sides accept the referee. The seat is also one of the last undecided in the country, and it will help set the size of the majority in the new House.
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