Florida will not finish counting thousands of absentee ballots until sometime Thursday, according to Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor Penelope Tounsley, reports the Miami Herald.
As of Wednesday morning, elections staffers still had 20,000 absentee ballots to put through a tedious counting process.
To start, a dozen elections staffers must electronically compare images of voters’ signatures on absentee ballots with the signatures on the voters’ registration cards. Then the workers must determine whether the ballots have been properly filled out before counting them in scanning machines.
If staffers reject any ballots, they set them aside for the Miami-Dade canvassing board to make the final call. The board, sitting in an adjacent room, consists of the chair, County Judge Shelley Kravitz, County Judge Andrew Hague, and the county supervisor of elections, Penelope Townsley.
The elections office must also count all provisional ballots by 5 p.m. Thursday. [Deputy Elections Supervisor Christina] White said she did not know the total number of provisional ballots.
