DUVAL COUNTY, Fla. – It took Duval County elections workers less than three hours to complete its audit of the voting systems for November’s General Election. This is a state mandate to ensure all the voting systems and processes worked properly.
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Duval County Supervisor of Elections Jerry Holland announced late Thursday afternoon a 100% accuracy into the audit. Holland said his staff conducted a manual hand count audit of the early voting, Election Day, vote-by-mail, and provisional ballots for the race of Florida Supreme Court Justice Francis for precincts 1206 and 1309.
The precincts were selected at random by County Judge Rhonda Peoples-Waters. Peoples-Waters is a member of the canvassing board.
“The election is finalized, it has already been certified,” Holland said. “This is to build confidence in the process and also expose what may be some errors, that voters may need to be aware of.”
As Holland showed News4JAX, one such error included one voter who manually circled “no” when asked if Florida judges should remain in office. Instead of circling, the voter was supposed to fill in the oval. Holland said due to the voter’s error, the machine did not pick up on the responses. Holland said the machine technically did what it was supposed to do.
“The canvassing board looked at it and said there’s a clear indication this voter did not want to retain any of the justices,” Holland said. “So therefore, they will count it as a ‘no’ vote, but the machine will not show it as a no vote. So, this shows us right now, we’ll be off by one vote.”
Election records in Duval show over 1,400 provisional ballots were rejected during this election cycle. That’s including 55 ballots flagged because voters had already cast a vote. Holland said the increase doesn’t signal voter fraud, but highlights concern some voters had about their ballots being counted. That is partly because they requested a mail-in ballot and filled it out but didn’t know if it would make it back in time.
Holland said this process does speak to the challenges of manual counting.
“When you consider this is just one race, 7,000 ballots,” Holland stated. “And we had over 477,000 ballots, it would take literally thousands of people days. It’s a good indication also that we should be very appreciative of the technology that Florida can report our results so quickly.”
Though no members of the public were present, these audits are open to people interested in seeing the process for themselves. Holland said it’s important for people to feel comfortable when they go to the voting booth.
“At the end of the day, we’ve got to trust our elections process,” Holland said. “We’ve got to prove to the public that it actually does work.”
The canvassing board has until Dec. 15 to provide a report with the results of the audit to the Department of State.
That report will detail:
- The overall accuracy of the audit.
- A description of any problems or discrepancies encountered.
- The likely cause of such problems or discrepancies.
- Recommended corrective action to avoid or mitigate such circumstances in future elections
