Tuesday night the chair of Duval Democrats criticized the Duval County Supervisor of Elections because 1,700 votes had yet to be counted as of 9:30 p.m., according to her legal team.
"It's just embarrassing that at this late hour, in this age of technology, that there are votes that are not yet counted. We have an expectation that those are going to be counted efficiently and expeditiously so we can know the results of elections," said Duval Democrats Chair Lisa King.
Earlier in the day Duval County Supervisor of Elections Mike Hogan acknowledged the issue.
A problem with the width of the ballot at several Duval County polling locations caused some ballots to be rejected by the tabulation machines.
Hogan said they discovered the problem first thing Tuesday morning and came up with a fix.
“First choice is we go to see if there’s another ballot that is of the right width. If there isn’t, then we go to trimming it. If that doesn’t work then we allow the voter just to place that ballot in the emergency bin and we’ll count it when it gets to the election center at the end of the day," he said.
Hogan said most of the problems were with the No Party Affiliation (NPA) ballots, although some Republican and Democratic ballots had also been rejected for being too wide.
Shortly before 11 p.m. King tweeted again saying the votes were finally being counted:
The chair of the Duval Republican Party, though, brushed off the ballot-width issue as par for the course in a state that deals with weather-induced power outages at polling places and other regular election blips.
"When you cannot feed a ballot into the machine to be counted, there's a procedure to go to Plan B. And it doesn't really matter why you had to go to Plan B, but the Plan B exists, it is used on a regular basis, and it shouldn't be that big of a deal," said Duval GOP Chair Karyn Morton Tuesday night.
Following King’s 9:30 p.m. comments WJCT News reached back out to Hogan for an update but had not received a response by the time of this story’s final upate for the night.
This story was updated at 11:16 p.m. with the comment from Karyn Morton.