Rows of tables. Teams of election workers. Brightly colored bins.
Manual recounts for three local races in Broward County got underway Thursday inside the warehouse of the voting equipment center in Lauderhill.
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A Hallandale Beach city commission race and one of Davie's 11 ballot questions are so close they fall under the 0.25% threshold to be reviewed and recounted by hand.
This is the next step after machine recounts earlier this week.
A city commission race in Dania Beach also needed a recount, but a winner was declared after the machine recount was completed Wednesday. Joyce Davis was declared the winner over Bill Harris in that contest.
The machine recount for the @DaniaBeachFL City Commission race is complete.
— Caitie Muñoz (@caitielee0917) November 12, 2020
Joyce Davis defeats Bill Harris to grab the last available city commission seat. Davis beat Harris by 86 votes after the machine recount finished.
This race does not trigger a manual recount. @WLRN
Next, there's another race that needs manual recounting on Friday — and it's the one with the most ballots in need of additional review.
Nearly 177,000 ballots that are either overvotes or undervotes will be reviewed and recounted by hand Friday. Two candidates in a countywide race for circuit court judge are separated by just 0.16%.
The majority of ballots to recount in this race are undervotes. That means, people left the bubble on their ballot blank.
Election workers also have a few hundred overvotes to look at. Those are when someone marks more than one bubble
Machines can't read those, so people recount them when the race gets this close. The process helps determine what a voter's intent was if they made strange marks on their ballot, like circling or underlining a candidate's name instead of filling in the bubble — or if they voted for more than one candidate, or none at all.
Going into the recount, George Odom Jr. led the race with just over 1,200 votes. He's been to the warehouse in Lauderhill to watch the other races get recounted.
"Just making sure that we are aware of what's going on and making sure that we can understand the process is our primary goal," he said. "And it appears that process has been very transparent."
Odom Jr. said watching the process play out has been a humbling experience.
"I've learned firsthand that your vote does count," he said. "In races such as this race where it's more or less a popular vote, every vote does count."
Incumbent Judge Dennis Bailey said he, too, feels like the process has been transparent and that he's looking forward to "a fair and objective result."
"We won't know until we actually look at the ballots," Bailey said. "So it's a big question mark left open, so we want to, you know, get rid of the question mark."
Broward's election officials expect to finish the recounting late Friday and to certify the results of the 2020 general election Saturday.
