Palm Beach County unable to finish recount by deadline (Update: Broward too?)

If you’d asked me two days ago which Flordia county would fail to meet the recount deadline, I would have said Broward. But today at 3 pm Eastern was the deadline and Broward got their machine recount done. Palm Beach County, on the other hand, did not. From the Sun-Sentinel:

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Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher said Saturday’s vote tallies will stand in Palm Beach County as her office was unable to complete the recount because of malfunctioning vote-counting machines.

“It was a heroic effort and we just completed uploading our Saturday results, as was required by law,” Bucher announced Thursday as the 3 p.m. deadline passed.

“If we had three or four more hours, we might have made the time,” Bucher said. “We got stuck with some mechanical issues.”…

After performing a check after the vote-counting machines broke down on Tuesday night, Bucher and her staff noticed the machines were not counting some ballot batches.

“Several boxes per precinct” were lost, she said.

A manual recount of over and undervotes was set to begin as soon as 4 pm. There are a total of 5,900 such ballots to examine. So what else are we waiting for at this point? Based on the machine recount, it appears the Florida Senate race is headed to a hand recount while the Governor’s race is not:

Florida’s secretary of state is expected to call for a hand recount in the Senate race since Scott leads Nelson by just .2 percent — within the .25 percentage legal threshold necessary to trigger the more intensive recount.

The current margin in the governor’s race, however, is outside that margin, at .4 percent.

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The Associated Press said today that it will not make a call in either race until the vote is certified next week.

The Associated Press will not declare winners in the races for Florida governor and Senate until state officials certify the results next week…

Florida counties have until Sunday to report final vote tallies, and state officials would certify those results next Tuesday.

Of course, we don’t need the AP to tell us who won. DeSantis still leads Gillum by more than 33,000 votes and Scott leads Nelson in the Senate race by more than 12,000 votes. Unless something truly extraordinary happens, those tallies aren’t going to change significantly.

Here’s Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher of Palm Beach County explaining earlier today why the county was likely to miss the deadline:

Update: All the reports I saw earlier said Broward made the deadline but now that may have changed.

From the Sun-Sentinel:

“We uploaded to the state two minutes late, so the state has chosen not to use our results,” Joe D’Alessandro told the Canvassing Board. The state will use the previous results instead, he said…

While Broward sent data late to the state, it also did not finish counting all of its votes.

The total votes in the U.S. Senate race between Gov. Rick Scott and U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson were 1,991 fewer than from Saturday’s count.

State Sen. Gary Farmer, who had been hoping for Nelson to get a boost from the recount, did not know what to make of the announced vote.

“It’s just disappointing to have a lower vote total now than what was reported previously,” Farmer said.

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I don’t want to start any conspiracies theories but the fact that people were bemoaning the fact that the new count didn’t help Nelson and now suddenly we’re back to using the old count…Good grief people! Florida recounts are enough to drive you crazy.

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