The Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher says she expects to begin the manual recount process at 11 a.m. ET Friday.
This comes after a Thursday order from the Secretary of State to complete a manual recount statewide for the Senate race and Agriculture Commissioner's race.
Palm Beach County also must complete a manual recount for a State House race.
Manual recounts are required when a candidate’s margin of victory is less than .25 percent.
However, Bucher said first, they need to complete the machine recount for the Senate race before they can begin the manual recount.
She said they have not completed the tabulation process to come up with vote totals for the Senate race to find all the over and under votes.
“We just want to get to a place where we should start a manual recount. Right now we’re incomplete and we’re incomplete for various reasons, mostly because there were requirements that we show some duplicated, damaged ballots, and haven’t run those and requirements that we canvass ballots for over and under votes that were duplicated by staff," Bucher said. "So, we’ve completed that process, but now we have to go run them through our tabulators to get the rest of our over unders.”
They do not have to manually recount every single ballot, only ones considered overvotes or undervotes.
An overvote is a ballot in which the voter appeared to vote for more than one candidate in a race, and an undervote is a ballot in which the voter appeared to vote for no candidate in a race.
An election worker, along with a representative from each political party, will review the ballots in question. If they cannot agree on the voter’s intent, it will go to the canvassing board.
A judge’s ruling will determine the order of the recount races.
The results are due by noon on Sunday.
