10 Days After General Election, Still No Clear Winner In 3 Races

HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, FL -- With barely enough time for a good night's sleep, staff at the Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Office will be back counting ballots Friday morning.

Just after completing the machine ballot recount ordered by the Secretary of State Thursday, Nov. 15, Hillsborough County Supervisor of Election Craig Latimer received word that the U.S. Senate, Commissioner of Agriculture and Hillsborough County's State Senate District 18 races met the statutory threshold to trigger a manual recount.

The threshold is a .05 percent difference between the votes received by both candidates.

Elections staff finished the machine ballot recount with plenty of time to make the Secretary of State's 3 p.m. Thursday deadline. Since Sunday, staff has spent eight hours a day sorting and re-scanning the more than one million ballots cast by Hillsborough County voters for the midtern election. That includes mail-in ballots, absentee ballots, early-voting ballots and election day ballots.

The process required the sorting of more than a million ballots in order to re-scan the votes cast on the first page of the ballot.Staff will begin the manual recount process Friday starting at 9 a.m. at the Robert L. Gilder Elections Service Center, 2514 N. Falkenburg Road, Tampa

However, Latimer said at the conclusion of the recount, the order of the candidates, the percentage of votes earned and the difference between them in each case remained
virtually the same.

The total votes tabulated during the recount was 846 fewer than originally counted, he noted. This is a difference of less than 0.16 percent.

"Conducting a full recount in a constricted time period is extremely challenging," he said. "We are forced to recreate in four days what takes place over a course of weeks."

The staff faced an additional challenge Wednesday when the office experienced two power outages and lost the use of one of its ballot machines.

"At this time, we haven't had time to analyze fully how those power outages may have impacted the count, nor to determine where human error may have been involved," Latimer said.

According to the Division of Elections, if a county is not able to submit its second unofficial returns in time, the first unofficial returns submitted become the second unofficial returns, and that is used to make a determination about whether to order a manual recount from all county results without further delay.

"The fact that the percentages between the candidates remains the same gives us full confidence in our voting process and systems," Latimer said. "Even though we achieved 99.84 percent success in our recount effort, we are not willing to accept that votes go unreported. For that reason, the Canvassing Board has decided that the first unofficial results will stand as our second unofficial."

The tentative schedule for the manual recount is 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Any changes to the Canvassing Board or recount schedule will be posted on the doors of the four Supervisor of Elections Offices and its website.

Images via Cherie Denham

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