Days after the 2018 midterm election, multiple sites across the nation went into recount procedures, specifically in Florida and Georgia congressional and gubernatorial races. The Senate and governor races of Florida resulted in razor-thin margins requiring a machine recount of the final vote. Following this, certain races qualified for an additional manual recount when the margins were still small enough.

Despite this news, many in our community are not aware of the recount procedure that must occur after close elections like those in Florida.

As every state has a different voting recount procedure “[In Florida], if a candidate is defeated by a margin that represents 0.5 percent or less of the total votes cast, state law will trigger an automatic machine recount… [If a candidate] loses by an even narrower margin of 0.25 percent or less of the total votes cast after the machine recount is finished, the Florida secretary of state would need to order an automatic manual recount, according to state law,” said the National Public Radio, or NPR.

At the conclusion of the automatic recount in Florida, the governor’s race was decided, but the senatorial race and Agricultural Commissioner race qualified for a manual recount.

With this manual recount, social studies teacher Matthew MacLeod explained that, “This question of voter intent kept coming up… The struggle is they had to resolve to a hand recount. Unfortunately, every time they have a recount, it’s not just a matter of whether we will feed them into machines again, because the machines would run into the same difficulties that they ran into before.”

This process has caused lots of controversy among candidates as well as voters. Several lawsuits were made over the weeks following the election, specifically the handling of vote counting and recount procedures.

In response to the lawsuits, MacLeod said, “When representatives and candidates believe that people attempted to vote for them, and that their votes were somehow suppressed, they have a right to file challenges. All of the lawsuits can be boiled down to [the concept stated above]”

With the conclusion of the Florida Governor race, the margins were not close enough to continue, declaring Republican Ron DeSantis the winner. The with a hand recount, Senator Bill Nelson, the Democratic candidate, conceded while Democratic candidate for Florida Agricultural commissioner Nikki Fried claimed victory. In addition, Republican candidate Brian Kemp beat out Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams.

After the conclusion of these extremely close races in Florida and Georgia, MacLeod said, “At the end of the day, every American needs to believe that their vote is going to count… It’s two-fold, every citizen’s vote has a to have a right to be counted, but it is reasonable to expect basic voting rules [such as filling in complete boxes, and taking voter intent into account].”