Most Bay Area counties make fast work of recounts

Pasco County is finished, and so is Pinellas, but other Bay Area counties are still hard at work completing a state-mandated vote recount before the 3 p.m. Thursday deadline.

In Hillsborough County, they’re still counting votes.

“We’re going through a lot of ballots. We’ve got over 527,000 ballots we’ll be processing in this recount,” said Craig Latimer, the supervisor of elections.

Pinellas County had 438,000 ballots to recount.

“They went through our scanners, and they did so at about a rate of 30,000 an hour,” said Dustin Chase, spokesperson for the Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections. “It’s an incredible rate.”

But things are going slower in Manatee County.

“We plan on being done [Wednesday,]” said Supervisor Michael Bennett. “That will give us all of Thursday in case we run into a glitch.”

It’s already happened once with a programming error. Manatee’s machines were not processing overvotes correctly.

"When we looked at the numbers coming out, we said, you know what, this isn't right,” Bennett said. “Something is wrong."

It set them back three hours.

In the end, supervisors don’t expect drastic changes from the machine recount. In Pasco, Andrew Gillum gained two votes in the governor race. Rick Scott lost two in the Senate race.

Pinellas is expecting more of the same.

"There have been provisional ballots that were added, and mail ballots that have been added, but we don't expect the results to change,” Chase said.