It wouldn’t be an election night without some early issues in Florida. (Chads, anyone?)
The Sunshine State’s intensely close governor’s race between Republican Gov. Rick Scott and former Gov. Charlie Crist (D) got off to a bumpy start Tuesday night when Crist filed an emergency motion to extend voting hours from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. in Broward County, Florida’s second largest, because of alleged voting machine malfunctions.
Related: Millions Without Health Coverage Hang on Gov Races
The Crist campaign said there were “several individual and systemic breakdowns that made it difficult for voters to cast regular ballots.”
Read the announcement here.
The court rejected the motion, but some pundits say it could result in more legal challenges in the coming days.
This comes just a year after Florida passed legislation to attempt to resolve the state’s problem-plagued voting process, according to The New York Times.
The Florida race has been fiercely competitive. In one debate, the candidates got into a scuffle because Crist had brought a fan on stage, which apparently irritated Scott.
Neither candidate enjoys high likeability among the public. Scott has routinely attacked Crist for switching political parties (Crist was a Republican when he served as Florida’s governor). Meanwhile, Crist has frequently slammed Scott for running a hospital chain that was slapped with more than $1 billion in fines for Medicaid fraud in the 1990s, as NBC noted.
The race has been a toss-up for weeks.
For much of Tuesday evening, CNN and NBC said the race was “too close to call,” with Crist at 47.7 percent of the vote and Scott at 47.4 percent. Shortly before 10:30 p.m., the Associated Press declared Scott the winner.
This article was updated at 11:15 p.m.
Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
