Florida election recount underway

The first election workers have begun the enormous task of recounting ballots in Florida’s bitterly close races for the US Senate and governor, ramping up their efforts after the secretary of state ordered a review of the two nationally watched contests.

Miami-Dade County election officials began feeding ballots into scanning machines on Saturday evening. The tedious work in that one South Florida county alone could take days, considering some 800,000 ballots were cast. Multiply that by 67 counties in the nation’s third most populous state, and the scope of the task was beginning to sink in yesterday.

‘Unprecedented’

The Florida secretary of state ordered the recounts on Saturday, an unprecedented step for the two flagship races in a state that took five weeks to decide the 2000 presidential election.

Florida’s 67 counties can decide when to begin their recounts, but must complete them by Thursday. Unofficial results show that Republican former US Rep. Ron DeSantis led Democratic Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum by less than 0.5 percentage points, which will require a machine recount of ballots. Following the recount announcement, Gillum withdrew his concession in the governor’s race.