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The final piece of the electoral map is now in place. After a four-day count, President Obama has won Florida’s 29 electoral voters with a squeaker of a margin.

With nearly 100% of the votes in, the Associated Press reported Obama had 50% to GOP challenger Mitt Romney’s 49.1%. The difference, according to the Florida secretary of state, was about 74,000 votes. Only a few military and overseas ballots are believed to be uncounted.

Florida’s outcome was not crucial to putting Obama over the electoral college edge – he had already secured 303 votes on election day, well above the 270 needed to win the presidency. But it can now be written in the history books: The final electoral tally for 2012 was 332 votes for Obama, 206 for Romney.


The four-day delay pales in comparison to the weeks-long drama in the state in 2000, when Florida’s razor-thin margin unleashed an army of lawyers, a media frenzy and, ultimately, intervention from the U.S. Supreme Court.

But residents in the state this week were nevertheless chagrined over Florida’s voting dysfunction, spurred in part this year by hours-long waits at polling sites and confusion over voting rules after the state passed a sweeping election law overhaul in 2011.

For the Record, 3:21 p.m. Nov. 10: A previous version of this story incorrectly cited the vote difference as 740,000. The difference is 74,000.

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melanie.mason@latimes.com

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