More than 14 hours after the polls closed, Palm Beach County’s numbers are still shifting from Tuesday’s Republican congressional District 19 primary. The latest unofficial and unposted figures suggest Ed Lynch won the primary by 0.56 percent — enough to avoid an automatic recount.

Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher said Joe Budd lost 9 votes when elections officials re-checked their numbers early this morning in response to discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters who signed in at precincts. Bucher said a few votes had been double-counted in precincts that used two optical scanners rather than one.

New numbers still haven’t been posted on Palm Beach County’s elections Web site, but Bucher this morning said Budd got 2,585 votes in Palm Beach County (down from 2,594 posted Tuesday night), Lynch got 2,547 (unchanged from Tuesday night) and Curt Price got 1,195 (down from 1,199).

Lynch beat Budd by 84 votes in Broward County.

Based on the latest numbers, when totals from Palm Beach County’s 263 precincts are added to totals from Broward County’s 93 precincts, Lynch leads Budd by 46 votes out of 8,160 cast. That’s a 0.56 percent difference. State law requires a machine recount if the difference is 0.5 percent or less.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 9:30 am and is filed under 2010 campaigns, elections, George Bennett. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.