Election count in Miami-Dade completed

DORAL, Fla. (WSVN) -- The election count in Miami-Dade has finally been completed, this news comes a few days after President Obama was officially re-elected.

Penelope Townsley, Supervisor of Elections, addressed the press about 12:45 p.m., Thursday, to make the announcement. "Generally, I think Miami-Dade County conducted a very good election," she said. "Am I embarrassed or disappointed about some of the things that happened? Absolutely. But I am focused on getting things right."

She said some of the problems came from the ballot itself being as long as 10 pages for most voters, with voters having to vote on 10 amendments presented to them, without any word limit, by the Florida legislature.

Miami-Dade elections officials said they exercised great caution, care and scrutiny to ensure every vote was counted. "We have done everything we could possibly do to prepare," Townsley said earlier. "We are not going to rush this process. We are going to make sure that every vote is counted."

As President Barack Obama woke up in the White House Thursday morning, Miami-Dade was the butt of national jokes. Mayor Carlos Gimenez addressed the issue to a CNN anchor. He said, "This is what you would call a perfect storm here in South Florida. Of course we had some operational problems we have to take care of. We're convening a special panel to look at the problems at our election sites."

Election officials said there were 210,000 absentee ballots counted before the election, and 31,000 counted after Obama was re-elected, and this morning they had about 500 left to go. Election officials blamed the delay on an influx of absentee voters and a long ballot. Carolina Lopez, spokesperson for Miami-Dade Elections, said, "As of last night, there were a couple of Municipal offices that were close to possibly running into a runoff election, but once we finished uploading the 21,000 absentee ballots, today, plus the remainder of the 500, we'll have a clear picture of where we are."

Florida is the last state to turn-in its official results, causing the election's office to take a lot of flack. "I believe, when you're the largest county in the state of Florida, history will put all eyes on us, but the important thing is to just keep on giving the best performance that we can and provide accurate results," Lopez said.

There were approximately 240,000 absentee ballots that had to be counted, officials said. However, there are still 2,870 provisional ballots that have to be counted. Townsley said those will be scrutinized carefully by the canvasing board later in the day.

"That is precisely the reason that we will be conducting an after action report to know what actually went wrong," said Townsley.

At the end of the day, when the announcement came, at 11:54 a.m., with all 829 precincts reporting, Barack Obama won with 62 percent of the vote against Romney's 38 percent.

Broward County also finished counting ballots, later Thursday afternoon. In that county, President Obama got 67 percent of votes, leaving Romney with 32 percent.

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