November 15, 2018

Oops! Broward County Didn’t Make the Recount Deadline After All

“Basically, I just worked my ass off for nothing.”

The Broward County canvassing board on November 15, the last day of Florida's machine recount.Pema Levy/Mother Jones

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Broward County, the epicenter of the drama surrounding Florida’s contentious elections, just missed the deadline for submitting its machine recount totals to the Florida secretary of state. Joe D’Alessandro, director for election planning and development, announced more than two hours after the 3 p.m. deadline Thursday that the county had uploaded its results two minutes late—and the state had rejected them.

The problem, said D’Alessandro, was “my unfamiliarity with their website.” The announcement was unexpected, because the canvassing board had approved of the results ahead of the deadline and D’Alessandro had headed out of the press’ sight to upload the results. Because the results didn’t go up in time, Broward’s preliminary results from last Saturday will still appear on the secretary of state’s website. “Basically, I just worked my ass off for nothing,” D’Alessandro said.

But the snafu won’t change the basic process. Because the margin in the US Senate election is below a quarter of a percent, it still trigger a hand recount, which incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson is hoping will erase his deficit. The hand recount will begin Friday at 7 a.m.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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