The Shark Tank blog in Florida has the latest information:

There’s a lot of misinformation circulating out there about the effort to tally up the votes in Congressman Allen West’s race, but here’s the bottom line- the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections has finished its canvassing, having counted all of the absentee and provisional ballots this past Friday. The conclusion- West is down by about 2400 votes cumulatively across the congressional district. The Martin County Supervisor of Elections has also accounted for all of their ballots, and there appears that there is no issue there.

The last possibility for West’s chances lies with the St. Lucie County Supervisor of Elections, who is dragging their feet in releasing the Voter sign-in rolls. West’s campaign is requesting these rolls in order to compare them with the actual votes cast. So far, the SOE is saying that they are not all tallied and is currently working on accounting for all of the sign-in rolls…..

That’s it. Anything else you hear out there about this race is bogus or simply speculation. Reports that there is over-voting in St. Lucie county is speculative. The candidates and amendments took up two voter cards, so some voters just voted on one card and not the other, some voted on both and turned them in, which accounts for the fact that there were more voter cards turned in than actual registered voters. West’s campaign does believe that there could be at least 700 extra cards submitted, that could translate into 350 extra votes.

UPDATE: An hour after this report was posted the St. Lucie County Canvassing Board agreed to an entire early-voting recount starting Sunday at 7 a.m. Most of the election-day problems with the vote count were among the early votes, including possible duplicate vote counts or over-counting. This recount will involve approximately 30,000 ballots.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/rob ... ts-voters/

I verifed this with some people on the ground who have been assisting in observing the count. There is some concern about getting enough observers there tommorrow at 7 AM..


Here is the official annoucement from the St Lucie County Supervisor of Elections

“PUBLIC NOTICE OF MEETING

AN EMERGENCY MEETING FOR THE CANVASSING BOARD HAS BEEN SCHEDULED FOR SUNDAY NOVEMBER 11, 2012 AT 7:00 AM AT THE SUPERVISOR OF ELECTIONS OFFICE, 4132 OKEECHOBEE ROAD

THE PURPOSE OF THE MEETING IS TO RECOUNT ALL BALLOTS CAST DURING EARLY VOTING”

FORT PIERCE — A recount of early votes from St. Lucie County began this morning with lawyers for apparent Democratic congressional victor Patrick Murphy and Republican U.S. Rep. Allen West raising early qualms.
St. Lucie County’s elections office announced Saturday that, because of concerns about the way tabulating equipment uploaded early vote totals on election night, it would conduct a meeting this morning “to recount all ballots cast during early voting.” That would be 37,379 ballots.

But Assistant County Attorney Heather Young began proceedings today by announcing the recount would only cover the final three days of early voting — Nov. 1-3 — because she said those were the only days tabulating equipment had a problem reading memory cards. A total of 16,275 ballots were cast on those three days.

West’s campaign said it was told last week that the problem occurred with the first three days of early voting — Oct. 27-29 — and therefore the recount of the final three days doesn’t address its concerns. West campaign manager Tim Edson said he’d prefer a recount of all eight days of early voting.

“What’s going on today is a sham,” Edson said. “It does nothing to at all to address the concerns we had after being told yesterday they would be recounting all early votes.”

An attorney for Murphy, Sean Dominick, told Young early today that there is no legal basis to recount early votes (state law calls for a recount only in races decided by 0.5 percent or less; Murphy was declared victor by 0.72 percent) and only ballots that were not counted before the election should be counted today.

“To the extent that there are votes that are uncounted, we are all in favor of any vote being counted,” Dominick said to Young.

Young answered that “the only way to do that is to feed all of them because we can’t identify which votes may or may not have been counted.”

Young said she was acting on a recommendation from the Florida Division of Elections.

Young later said that today’s exercise, though described as a “recount” in the public notice from the Supervisor of Elections office, is actually a “re-feed” of ballots. And while national interest is focused on the West-Murphy congressional race, Young said the “re-feed” covers all the races on the St. Lucie County ballot.

Follow updates on the recount at twitter.com/gbennettpost