Palm Beach machines overheat, miss recount votes

The Palm Beach County elections supervisor says aging equipment has overheated, causing mismatched results in the recount of ballots in Florida’s U.S. Senate race.

Susan Bucher said Tuesday night that the 11-year-old machines began having problems on Monday as early voting ballots were being counted. When the numbers were crunched on Tuesday, they didn’t match.

WPTV says a mechanic was flown in to fix the issues, but Bucher says “we don’t have a lot of assurances.”

She says the machines “started overheating so as a result the tally types are not reconciling properly.” That means about 174,000 early voting ballots in the state’s third most populous county will have to be recounted.

Workers are working around the clock to count the vote, but Bucher has already said they will not meet the state’s Thursday deadline to report the recounted votes. Nearly 600,000 ballots were cast in the county.