Only 16,664 more votes added to FL's final results

On Nov. 3rd, FL DOS reported that 7,531,402 were cast for Bush and Kerry.

On Nov. 14th, FL DOS reported that 7,548,066 were cast for Bush and Kerry.

So between the election on Nov 2 and the final certified count on Nov 14th, Bush got 8176 more votes and Kerry got 8488 giving us a total of 16,664 additional votes.

This seems like an extremely low number?

Does anyone know how many provisional votes there were?

How many overseas ballots that came in after Nov 2? I believe overseas ballots have 10 extra days to arrive. Yet 8 counties did not change their original results and 10 other only added 1 or 2 votes.

What happened to all those absentee ballots that got lost down in Broward and WPB? Many people did not get ballots until the Saturday before the election and certainly didn't have enough time to return them by election day.

Can anybody tell me, where did all the votes go?

Florida wasn't close enough to count the provisionals.

Maybe Florida's laws are different, but my understanding of the federal requirements is that they only have to be counted if the race is close enough that they could make a difference.

16000 absentee ballots (post-election-day) seems about right based on 2000.

in the Presidential race, the race for Senate was close enough that they should have counted the provisional ballots at least for that race.

And they were mostly from Palm Beach, Broward and M-D (Blue counties). It's in this article from Nov. 3rd:

http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/10093347.htm

They weren't counted until 3-4 days later. I don't understand why the numbers didn't change.

This is the sort of thing I've been looking for. Thanks.

So now the question of the day is where did 184,000 votes go? That's a lot of votes that just sort of disappeared?

BTW: Welcome to DU :hi:

Seems like there is a lot of VOODOO MATH going on here in Florida.

Thanks for the welcome! :toast:

There were at least 3 different sets of returns published on the FL Dept of State's website.

On Nov 3rd, they posted the 'Unofficial Election Night Returns' (may not include absentee or provisional ballots). Only 98.7% of the precincts had reported at that point.

On Nov 10th, I downloaded the '1st Set of Unofficial Returns' which I believe is the tally from Nov 4th.

On Nov 14th, I downloaded a different '1st Set of Unofficial Returns'. However this data matches exactly the data from the 'Official Returns' that they released on Nov 18th.

On Nov 18th, the state released the 'Official Results'

Just wanted to clear up where the data I am using is coming from and why it can get a little confusing.