A machine recount is underway in the race for Tallahassee City Commission Seat 3. Leon County Elections Supervisor Mark Earley doesn’t expect the initial margin to narrow, which would lead to a hand recount.
On election night, unofficial results showed Jeremy Matlow leading Lisa Brown by 327 votes, or a margin of just .44 percent. Earley says he doesn’t think the result change following the machine recount.
"It’s very unlikely that’s going to get within the boundaries of a manual recount. I don’t expect the vote to change appreciably," Earley said Saturday evening. "Because we’ve got the … ballots for that race here in our possession. And we’ve already audited them and done the tabulation once before, and I think they were identical. So I don’t expect any change there."
Earley says his confidence in that prediction comes from the accuracy of that audit process, which he says his office “pioneered.”
"We retabulate every ballot, as a course, through the election process. Every day after early voting and after our vote-by-mail ballots start coming in, after we tabulate them, we take them immediately to our audit system, scan them in there, and we do a full 100-percent retabulation," Earley said.
Earley says his office should be done with all recounts including statewide races by Monday.
