RIVIERA BEACH, Fla. _ The Palm Beach County elections tabulation center was on pause Thursday morning _ just hours before the 3 p.m. state deadline for submitting updated vote totals _ despite being far behind schedule to finish recounts in the races for U.S. Senate, governor and commissioner of agriculture and consumer services.
The county shut off its ballot-counting machines Wednesday evening around 8 p.m. and hadn't restarted them yet by 9 a.m. the next morning. The windowless warehouse where county workers have been frantically recounting ballots around the clock for five days was quiet and nearly empty on Thursday morning except for a small group of volunteers, lawyers and reporters.
Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher went home Wednesday evening after spending three days straight at the tabulation center. She also sent her information technology manager home because she said he had been awake for 42 hours and needed a break. The IT manager, Jeff Darter, had been the only county worker recounting ballots for several hours early Wednesday evening as the county struggled to reconcile mismatched vote totals. Bucher told WPTV that the IT worker was the only person with the expertise to identify missing tallies from more than a dozen precincts' Election Day ballots after the county's ballot-counting machines overheated on Tuesday night and gave incorrect vote totals.
Bucher told WPTV that she believed there would be enough time on Thursday to identify the missing tallies before the 3 p.m. deadline.
It was unclear why other elections staff couldn't continue running ballots overnight to finish counting votes in the Senate race or start counting votes in the race for governor. Unlike ballot-counting machines in Miami-Dade, where elections staff finished recounting ballots Tuesday evening, Palm Beach's decade-old ballot-counting machines can only recount one race at a time.
Palm Beach elections staff started with the Senate race between Gov. Rick Scott and U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and had planned to move on to the governor's race next. However, Bucher had already warned that her staff would not be able to meet the deadline to recount votes cast in the governor and agriculture commissioner races and in a Florida House race. She said earlier in the week that she was confident they would finish counting votes in the Senate race, but after the machine malfunction she was less certain, saying that the county was "in prayer mode to finish on time."
Palm Beach had previously stopped running its ballot-counting machines around noon on Wednesday for roughly four hours. Bucher said the pause was to allow for vote reconciling _ making sure the early vote totals from the recounted ballots match the totals from Election Day.
