FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. _ Broward County has finally started recounting ballots from last week's midterm election.
Late Tuesday morning, the Supervisor of Elections Office finished the process of separating the first page of the ballots _ the page that contains the races that need to be recounted _ from all the other pages, reports said.
Page One has the contests that are part of the statewide recount: U.S. Senate, governor and state agriculture commissioner.
Broward has been the focus of national attention because of the slow pace of the initial round of vote counting from the election and the slow start to the recount, which was ordered by the state on Saturday for the three contests in which the margin was less than .05 percent of the vote.
Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher said her office is "close to finishing" counting in the Senate race.
Bucher said she didn't have any numbers in the contest at midday.
The deadline to report results in the statewide recount is 3 p.m. EST Thursday.
In Palm Beach County, the recount started Saturday afternoon. Miami-Dade County also started recounting over the weekend, and elections officials said about half the ballots were counted by Monday. Some counties, including Orange, didn't start until Monday.
In Broward County, elections staff need to sort through more than 3.5 million pages of ballots before they can start the actual recount _ a task estimated to take up to 35 hours, said Joseph D'Alessandro, director of election planning and development.
Broward started sorting on Sunday, but both Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties started the process Thursday, allowing those counties more time to get the job done, according to WLRN-FM.
Despite the amount of work involved, Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes has said she was confident the recount would get done by Thursday.
"We will meet the deadline," she said Monday.
In Palm Beach County, Bucher said Monday that it would "almost impossible" for her county to meet the Thursday deadline to complete recounts in all three races because of outdated laws and outdated equipment certified by the state.
She said Tuesday she has requested $11.1 million from Palm Beach County to get new voting machines that can do multiple recounts at once. She said the current machines have been in use since before she started the job in 2007.
The Palm Beach County elections Canvassing Board on Tuesday was reviewing duplicated ballots to determine voter intent. These ballots were damaged going through the voting machines or had other issues such as voters using Wite-Out or erasers to change their minds. Election staff duplicated those ballots by creating copies that could be counted. On Tuesday, the board was reviewing ballots questioned by Gov. Rick Scott's attorneys, who said Bucher allowed duplication without witnesses present.
In unofficial statewide results, Scott is slightly ahead of U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., in the contest for U.S. Senate.
