In a stunning development, Broward County election officials said they uploaded their results two minutes past Florida’s 3 p.m. deadline Thursday and the state is not using the recount results. Instead they’re using the first unofficial results that were submitted on Saturday.
That means all of the recount efforts over the past five days were thrown out. Elections worker Joe D’Alessandro told the canvassing board the delay was due to his "unfamiliarity with the website" used to upload the results.
"We uploaded to the state two minutes late so the state has chosen not to use our machine recount results and they are going to use the first unofficial results as our second unofficial results," D’Alessandro said.
Earlier Thursday, election workers told the canvassing board they were submitting the results at about 2:50 p.m., ten minutes before the deadline.
In addition, the county elections officials are trying to figure out why there was a 2,040 vote difference between the first results and the second results.
"There was a co-mingling of ballots and that we did not correctly handle the ballot," D’Alessandro said.
Meanwhile, the county has to start preparing for a hand recount in the U.S. Senate and Department of Agriculture seats. That hand recount is scheduled to start Friday morning at 6 a.m. The deadline for the hand recount is Sunday afternoon.
