Nicole Locklin, Democratic candidate for Congress in Florida's 26th District, filed a lawsuit this Thursday in the Eleventh Judicial Circuit Court of Miami-Dade against the Office of the Supervisor of Elections of the county and its head, Alina García, to demand access to electoral documents related to the contest she lost by fewer than 1,800 votes to the Republican Mario Díaz-Balart.
The legal document, submitted electronically at 9:33 PM on Wednesday, clarifies its precise scope from the very first paragraph: "This action does not request the court to decide who won the Congressional elections, determine if there was electoral interference, compel the defendants to create a register or conduct a new analysis, nor grant any compensation."
What Locklin is indeed demanding is access to public records that he requested on November 4 and 7, which he claims have not been fully provided nor with a delivery schedule.
Among the requested documents are images of ballots and electronic voting records from the ES&S and Clear Ballot systems, audit logs from the counting systems, all versions of the results published on election night and their modifications, reports on provisional ballots and mail-in votes, and communications regarding ballots that did not arrive or arrived late.
The background of the lawsuit is the in District 26: 114,578 votes compared to 112,874 for Locklin, a margin of 1,704 votes (0.74%) that exceeds the 0.5% threshold required to trigger an automatic machine recount in Florida.
The candidate notes that during the election night of November 3, her published totals appeared to decrease. In her evidence preservation notice on November 7, she described two specific discrepancies: the district total for Locklin dropped from 115,320 to 112,320 votes, and the company civicAPI reported that its partial for Miami-Dade changed from 48,822 to 46,629.
The attorney for the electoral office, Oren Rosenthal, attributed the error to the publication of results by the Associated Press and recommended that Locklin request the agency to retain its own records. AP acknowledged that a manual data entry error added about 3,000 votes to the candidate's total and that the figure was quickly corrected.
Locklin, however, finds that explanation insufficient because the higher total also appeared in public data from Miami-Dade retrieved by independent services, not just in the AP broadcast. In an email to Rosenthal dated November 7, her lawyers pointed out that they needed the records to determine “what caused the removal of votes and my lead.”
The office responded partially on several occasions: on November 5, it provided a report on discrepancies in mail-in voting and a report on provisional ballots, both containing data redacted for cybersecurity exemptions. On November 12, it sent only an Excel file with mail-in ballots that had been delivered but not returned. At the time of filing the lawsuit, the audit records, versions of results, and incident reports remained undelivered and without an estimated delivery date.
Locklin requests an urgent hearing from the judge, an order compelling the release of available public documents, a specific explanation of the legal exemptions used to withhold information, the preservation of all records, and, if applicable, the payment of costs and fees associated with the proceedings.
The case is set against a backdrop of tension surrounding García: in the neighboring District 27, the Democratic campaign of Eliott Rodríguez unsuccessfully sought to remove her from the recount due to an alleged conflict of interest, a request that federal judge David S. Leibowitz rejected on November 9 due to insufficient evidence.
The certification of results in Miami-Dade is scheduled for Monday, November 16 at noon, and the final state certification will take place on Tuesday, November 17 before the Electoral Canvassing Commission in Tallahassee, turning the urgent hearing requested by Locklin into a race against time.
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