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