JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Duval County election officials on Friday double-checked primary election results to ensure that the count was accurate.
An audit of the election count began at 1 p.m. at the Duval County Supervisor of Elections Office’s Election Center on Imeson Park Boulevard.
How the post-primary election audit worked was only race and one precinct chosen at random were checked. It was the race for the Jacksonville City Council District 9 seat — a special election — and it was precinct 904, which was at a community center off 20th Street in Northwest Jacksonville. Workers hand-counted the ballots to make sure that the numbers match the ones that were reported for that race and that precinct on Aug. 23.
News4JAX talked with Duval County Chief Elections Chief Robert Phillips about why they do this.
“If there’s a problem, we try to find the root of it. We can always go back to any of the forms and find out if maybe something was filled out wrong or if a ballot may have been mishandled at the precinct, but we’re pretty accurate they’ll come out 100% accurate,” Phillips said. “We’ve been doing this for over 10 years. We do an audit after every single election. So far, almost every one except one has always come out to be 100% accurate.”
There were 713 ballots in all to recount. It didn’t take long for the workers to review the ballots, and the hand count correctly matched what the machine reported on election day — 713 ballots.
News4JAX asked Duval County Supervisor of Elections Mike Hogan what would happen if it didn’t match.
“If it’s off once or two, it doesn’t change anything, really,” Hogan said. “But it really bothers us. We got to go figure out where that ballot may be.”
This event happens after every election, and it’s open to the public. However, no members of the public attended Friday.
“Now, this is the first time we actually we’ve always publicized the fact that we’re going to do this. We put out a press release this time, and as you saw, there was just the media that was here,” Hogan said. “That’s not too rare. But that is rare for y’all because I don’t think y’all have done this before.”
Even though the audit is not new, calls for transparency are making this more important now and for the upcoming midterm election in November.
“We’re just making sure that the numbers that we’re producing and tabulating are accurate,” Hogan said. “I don’t know if other states do this or not. But I’m glad it’s in the law in Florida.”
The race for the District 9 seat was overwhelmingly won by Tyrona Clark Murray, who was sworn into that office on Friday morning.