Why did Secretary of State Harris refuse to include the partial results from the Palm Beach recount in the totals certified on Sunday night?
[added November 27] In her verbal comments, Secretary Harris stated that the partial Palm Beach recount results submitted prior to the 5 p.m. deadline did not comply with section 102.166 of the Florida Election Code. Apparently her comment referred to section 102.166’s authorization to a county to “manually recount all ballots” if the initial three precinct sampling indicated are error in vote tabulation (emphasis added). This interpretation would dictate that “all or none” of the recounted ballots be included in the certification. The Gore team is expected to challenge this interpretation in a contest. They likely will argue that once an error in vote tabulation has been identified that would justify a manual recount, each manually recounted ballot incrementally corrects or reduces the error, and thus a partial recount, while less accurate than a total recount, is more accurate than the prerecount tallies. They also likely will argue that the Secretary retained discretion to consider
Related Questions
- Why did Secretary of State Harris refuse to include the partial results from the Palm Beach recount in the totals certified on Sunday night?
- Why aren’t the vote totals for write-in candidates included on the Secretary of State’s Election Results website?
- Why do vote totals on the Secretary of State’s website change after Election Day?
