Miami-Dade Elections Recount Finished? Not So Fast
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DORAL (CBSMiami) - After finishing a machine recount of general election ballots with meteoric speed, Miami-Dade's elections office isn't done yet.
A required, "quality assurance" process means staff members will work into the night, but not necessarily all night.
The quality assurance work involves looking at all 813,000 ballots to assure the first page, containing the three races at issue, was separated out and included in the machine count. Any pages that were missed would be scanned into the final tally.
The Miami-Dade County Elections Department completed its state-mandated machine recount of the ballots on Tuesday night, well ahead of the Thursday deadline.
Miami-Dade's canvassing board returned to the elections office Wednesday to hand examine and recount 206 provisional ballots. The board, and Supervisor of Elections Christina White also firmed up plans for hand counting some 53,500 over and under ballots, a hand recount almost certain to be ordered in the races for U.S. Senator and state Agriculture Commissioner.
What did the Miami-Dade machine recount reveal?
Elections officials won't reveal that until Thursday at 3 p.m. when the state has ordered the results released.
Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner ordered recounts from 67 elections departments after receiving unofficial vote tallies on Saturday.
State law requires a machine recount in races where the margin is less than 0.5 percentage points.
In the Senate race, Rick Scott's lead over Nelson was 0.14 percentage points. In the governor's contest, unofficial results showed Ron DeSantis ahead of Andrew Gillum by 0.41 percentage points.
Once the machine recounts are complete, a hand recount will be ordered in any race where the difference is 0.25 percentage points or less, meaning it could take even longer to complete the review of the Senate race if the difference remains narrow.
RELATED STORY: HOW FLORIDA RECOUNTS WORK
Results for races that need hand recounts are due on November 18th.
Currently, the Senate and Agriculture Commissioner races are close enough that they will need a manual recount.
