This is where you'll find the Florida election results for the 2012 presidential election, the state's Senate race and House contests and how citizens voted on ballot measures.
Florida has 29 electoral votes. In 2008, President Barack Obama won the Sunshine State, garnering 50.9 percent of the vote.
Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, had a slight lead in the Florida polls going into the 2012 general election, although some prediction models still called the state a tossup between the two candidates.
Click Image To View Interactive Electoral Map
COMMENTARY: As of Wednesday evening, November 7, 2012, President Barack Obama had 49.87 percent of the statewide vote versus 49.27 percent for Romney, with just 49,963 votes separating them, according to the Florida Division of Elections.
Officials throughout the state blamed an unexpectedly high number of absentee ballots and the length of the ballots, which included 11 proposed state constitutional amendments, for long lines at polling places and delays in tallying final results.
But Republican Governor Rick Scott's decision not to extend early voting ahead of Election Day, after it was cut back from 14 to eight days by Scott and the Republican-controlled Legislature, was also cited as causing exceedingly long voter lines at many precincts on Tuesday.
Democrats have said repeatedly that the cutback was a part of an unsuccessful attempt to blunt turnout in Florida by Obama supporters.
Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez apologized for the long lines in his county on Wednesday, after acknowledging that some voters had been forced to wait up to six hours to cast their ballots.
Gimenez, whose county accounts for about 10 percent of Florida's nearly 12 million registered voters said.
"That should not have happened. We had a very long ballot. It was the longest ballot in Florida history."
The final margin of victory in Florida may be less than a percentage point.
Some political pundits say the delays highlight Florida's seeming inability to hold elections that are free of controversy and public mockery.
Seth Gordon, a former political consultant based in Miami said.
"There are so many different potential sources of interference and conscious efforts to muck it up, we won't know for a while yet who to point the finger at. We could have been there in the bulls-eye of the whole works looking idiotic just like last time," he said, referring to 2000, when George Bush won Florida by 537 and captured the White House. We may be just as idiotic this time, but it doesn't matter because no one is watching. Last time, we held up the entire country."
As of 6:00 p.m., Wednesday, November 7, 2012, all of Florida's votes still had not been counted. However, preliminary totals are available as follows:
Click Image To Enlarge
As you can readily see, President Barack Obama is ahead of Governor Mitt Romney by about 47,000 votes, but according to several election analysts, the final Florida vote count lead is not likely to change much, but increase in favor of President Obama, because the remaining uncounted ballots are from voters in heavily Democratic Dade and Broward counties.
Courtesy of an article dated November 6, 2012 appearing in Huffington Post Politics and an article dated November 7, 2012 appearing in the Chicago Tribune
It is shameful that Florida STILL does not know how to conduct an election. Do they need the UN to oversee their elections???
Posted by: Jean | 11/08/2012 at 12:31 PM