The results are in for the Tallahassee City Commission seat 3 race.
After a weekend machine recount and a Monday Morning manual recount, the Leon County Supervisor of Elections Canvassing Board declared Tom Derzypolski will head to a November runoff for the seat with PJ Perez.
Primary election night rendered a close call between Derzypolski and Talethia Edwards with results showing a 24-vote split.
After a manual count of the ballots, the space between the two candidates dropped to just 15 votes.
“The official result is after several days of both a machine recount and a hand recount,” Judge Nina Ashenafi Richardson told a room full of observers watching the process take place.
Richardson serves as chair of the Canvassing Board alongside Elections Supervisor Mark Early and Leon County Commissioner Nick Maddox.
The three reviewed 25 ballots that had been flagged as either undervotes or overvotes in the race. Some ballots had no candidates selected, hesitancy marks that were inconsistent and triggered a ballot machine to miscount and even marks that were misplaced. Together, the board decided whether and how the ballots had been cast.
Derzypolski, who attended the public meeting, says he was surprised to see how much attention went into the process.
Though he says he was nervous about the recount, his team has already started moving into the next phase.
“This recount created a few days of hesitation, right? You want to respect the process, but we’ve been busy completing our plans for our next phase and we’re just going to get back to work listening to the people of Tallahassee and talking about what we know they care about,” Derzypolski says.
Election results are available at leonvotes.gov.