“Florida counties race to recount votes by Thursday deadline”

Miami Herald:

Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner was aware of recount issues that surfaced in Broward County on Sunday, but said through a spokeswoman that the issues were resolved.

The county had an issue during the logic and accuracy testing, spokeswoman Sarah Revell, but the recount is now underway. Logic and accuracy testing is required so that any potential issues can be corrected before a recount begins.

On Saturday, the razor-thin margins in the races of U.S. Senate, agriculture commissioner and the governor’s race caused Detzner to order mandatory machine recounts in all three statewide races after all counties submitted their unofficial results by noon.

The state’s 67 elections departments have just five days to recount more than 8.2 million combined ballots cast over an entire month leading up to Tuesday’s midterms….

In order to make the Thursday deadline, the county has to count about 6,874 ballots per hour, so that delay puts Broward about 25,000 ballots behind that pace.

Gov. Rick Scott’s attorney, Tim Cerio, said he didn’t know what caused Broward County’s delay Sunday morning, but that two more machines were being sent to the office from Orlando.

In Miami-Dade, the state’s most populated county, the recount officially began early Saturday evening, as workers began to load paper ballots into scanning machines for a tabulation that will likely take days.

Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties, home to Tampa and St. Petersburg each began their respective recounts at 9 a.m. Sunday.

Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections Craig Latimer told reporters Sunday that he had no doubt his office would meet Thursday’s deadline for completing the machine recount of more than 520,000 ballots. Nor did he see the likelihood that the results would shift much.

In Palm Beach County, the election supervisor told reporters Saturday afternoon that the Thursday deadline would be “impossible” to meet.

Share this: