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Matt Caldwell Files Suit Against Broward SOE

Florida Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services candidate and State Rep. Matt Caldwell
Mark Foley
/
Florida House of Representatives
Florida Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services candidate and State Rep. Matt Caldwell

The Republican contender for the role of state commissioner of agriculture joined the growing list of candidates filing lawsuits Friday afternoon.

 Listen to the audio version of this story.

Gov. Rick Scott announced his U.S. Senate campaign's intent to sue the elections supervisors in Broward and Palm Beach counties Thursday night. By Friday morning, rival candidate Sen. Bill Nelson was suing the Florida Secretary of State in hopes to extend Saturday's deadline for unofficial vote counts.

And, by the afternoon, Republican Matt Caldwell followed the governor's lead, filing a suit against Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes.

The suit, filed in the 17th judicial circuit, asks the court to determine if Snipes illegally included ballots after polls closed on Election Day, and if so, to "remove those votes from the electoral tabulation."

The state representative called the race in his favor at 10 p.m. Election Night, when he had a 0.5 percent lead over Democrat Nikki Fried. But, by the time of his suit filing Friday afternoon, the election had flipped, with Caldwell trailing Fried by 0.04 percent of the vote.

The statement announcing the suit from Caldwell's campaign mirrored some of the governor's language about voter fraud the night before.

Caldwell campaign spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez said in a statement, "We want to ensure every legal vote is counted and that we have a forensic reconstruction of when ballots were cast and how." 

Copyright 2018 WGCU

RachelIacovoneis a reporter and associate producer ofGulf Coast LiveforWGCU News. Rachel came toWGCU as an intern in 2016, during the presidential race. She went on to cover Florida Gulf Coast University students at President Donald Trump's inauguration on Capitol Hill and Southwest Floridians in attendance at the following day's Women's March on Washington.