The extraordinarily close race for second place in the Tallahassee City Commission Seat 3 primary has moved to a manual recount Monday morning. According to reports by WCTV and WTXL, Tom Derzypolski holding a 13-vote advantage over Talethia Edwards for a spot in the November runoff.<\/p>\n
The Leon County Canvassing Board scheduled the manual recount to begin at 8:30 a.m. Monday, Aug. 24, according to the Leon County Supervisor of Elections Office.<\/p>\n
The manual review follows a machine recount conducted over the weekend that reduced Derzypolski\u2019s advantage by one vote.<\/p>\n
After provisional and vote-by-mail ballots were reviewed last week, Derzypolski held second place with 10,532 votes compared with 10,518 for Edwards \u2014 a difference of only 14 votes, or about 0.04 percentage points.<\/p>\n
The machine recount subsequently resulted in Derzypolski losing one vote, reducing his lead over Edwards to 13 votes and triggering the manual recount.<\/p>\n
The recount will determine which candidate advances to the Nov. 3 general election runoff against P.J. Perez, who finished first in the six-candidate primary with approximately 29% of the vote. No candidate received the majority required to win the seat outright.<\/p>\n
The race has tightened since election night.<\/p>\n
Initial results following the Aug. 18 primary showed Derzypolski with 10,524 votes and Edwards with 10,500 \u2014 a 24-vote difference. After election officials reviewed provisional ballots and vote-by-mail ballots requiring additional attention, the margin fell to 14 votes.<\/p>\n
Leon County Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley has emphasized that recounts are a normal part of the election process when margins are extremely narrow. During the machine recount, all ballots containing the Seat 3 contest were rerun through the tabulation system under established chain-of-custody procedures.<\/p>\n
Both Edwards and Derzypolski have publicly expressed confidence in the election process while awaiting the final result.<\/p>\n
The winner of the recount will face Perez in November for the seat currently held by City Commissioner Jeremy Matlow, who gave up the seat to run for mayor.<\/p>\n
The Supervisor of Elections Office has not yet posted a final result from Monday\u2019s manual recount. Its website currently identifies the manual recount as the next step in resolving the Seat 3 contest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The extraordinarily close race for second place in the Tallahassee City Commission Seat 3 primary has moved to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379691,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[232,234,233],"class_list":["post-379690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee","tag-tallahassee-headlines","tag-tallahassee-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}