A worker loads ballots into machines at the Broward County Supervisor of Elections office during a recount on Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2018, in Lauderhill, Fla. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
A worker loads ballots into machines at the Broward County Supervisor of Elections office during a recount on Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2018, in Lauderhill, Fla. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson) Credit: Brynn Anderson

Tallahassee, Fla. — With time running out in Florida’s high-stakes election recount, lawsuits piled up on Wednesday amid a maelstrom of courtroom arguments, outdated ballot-scanning machines overheated and President Donald Trump leveled his latest unfounded allegation, that people had been voting in disguise.

Many counties have wrapped up their machine recount ahead of a Thursday deadline to complete reviews of the U.S. Senate and governor races, but larger Democratic strongholds still were racing to meet the deadline.

No less than six federal lawsuits have been filed so far in Tallahassee. In a key court battle, a federal judge said he was unlikely to order election officials to automatically count thousands of mail-in ballots that were rejected because the signatures on the ballots did not match signatures on file. U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, however, did say he was open to giving voters extra time to fix their ballots.

State officials said the matching requirement had led to the voiding of nearly 4,000 ballots, although that figure did not include larger counties such as Miami-Dade.

Walker rebuffed arguments from lawyers representing the state that allowing people until Saturday evening to fix their ballots would disrupt the recount process and the deadlines to report results. The deadline for hand recounts is Sunday.

“I don’t understand why it’s going to completely bring Florida to its knees,” Walker said.

He said that, divided among 67 counties, the number of ballots would be only a handful per county, and they’d be considered while the elections supervisors still are counting overseas ballots.

President Donald Trump also added to the grumblings about the recount by arguing without evidence that some people unlawfully participated in the election by dressing in disguise.

“When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles,” Trump said in an interview with The Daily Caller published on Wednesday. “Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.”

Meanwhile, problems continued in Palm Beach County, where tallying machines overheated while working overtime. That caused mismatched results with the recount of 174,000 early voting ballots, forcing workers to go back and redo their work.

Right now, Palm Beach County looks like it could miss the Thursday deadline, even though Nelson and Democrats filed lawsuits seeking to suspend it.