A federal judge has ruled that Florida election officials must include about 4,000 ballots that were previously rejected due to problems with their signatures in the ongoing recount, The Washington Post reports.
U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker’s ruling mostly affected mail-in or provisional ballots that had signatures that did not match those that state officials had on file, and was not as far-reaching as Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson’s legal team had hoped.
“Here, potentially thousands of voters have been deprived of the right to cast a legal vote — and have that vote counted — by an untrained canvassing board member based on an arbitrary determination that their respective signatures did not match,” wrote Walker. “Such a violation of the right to vote cannot be undone.”
The judge added that voters who had been “belatedly” alerted to the problem with their ballot would have until 5 p.m. on Saturday to “cure” the issue.
“The county supervisors are directed to allow those voters who should have had an opportunity to cure their ballots in the first place to cure their votes-by-mail and provisional ballots now,” Walker wrote.
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