West has argued that some votes had been accidentally double counted on election night . | REUTERS West wins round in recount fight

Florida Rep. Allen West, trailing narrowly in his still-uncalled race, notched a legal win late Friday, as election officials agreed to re-tabulate a batch of early ballots that the conservative congressman has pushed to have reexamined.

The St. Lucie County Supervisor of Elections announced it would begin re-tallying all votes that were cast between Oct. 27 and Nov. 3. The office will begin re-tabulating at 9 a.m. Saturday.


West has argued that those votes had been accidentally double counted on election night and provided a winning margin to his Democratic opponent, 29-year-old construction company executive Patrick Murphy. Murphy’s lead of nearly 2,000 votes is just outside the 0.5 percent margin that would trigger an automatic district-wide recount under Florida law.

The decision capped a day of dramatic legal maneuverings, which began Friday afternoon when a judge turned down a request by West to prevent St. Lucie County, one of three counties in the 18th Congressional District, from certifying its election results. The battle then moved to the election office’s canvassing board, which convened hours later to determine whether to re-tabulate the votes in question.

While lawyers for West argued that questions surrounding the counting of ballots on election night necessitated a re-checking, Murphy’s team, which has declared victory in the race and is looking to defend its lead, insisted there was no legal cause to conduct a re-tally.

“The votes were fairly counted the first time and it is outside the legal recount margin,” Eric Johnson, a Murphy senior advisor, wrote in an email. “The canvassing board is not following the law. You can’t keep counting until you reach the result you desire.”

The elections office has admitted making mistakes in counting the ballots, saying there was an error in feeding memory cards from voting machines through the vote-counting system. At a press conference earlier this week, the office’s supervisor, Gertrude Walker, said workers had acted in “haste” to get results out to the public on election night and that “mistakes were made.”

The Florida secretary of state office said it was “concerned” about the situation and intervened this week, sending a team of auditors to the office to determine what errors had been made.

On Sunday, the St. Lucie Supervisor of Elections re-tabulated early votes cast between Nov. 1 and Nov. 3, which diminished Murphy’s lead slightly. But the office said on Friday they would examine those ballots once again because it had found a box containing 304 early ballots cast in that period that had not yet been counted.

West’s advisers expressed satisfaction with the ruling, but said they still planned to press for a full recount of all absentee ballots cast. They also said they were considering filing a lawsuit contesting the election.

St. Lucie County has until Sunday at noon to certify its results, and Florida has until Tuesday to finalize the results from all three of the counties that comprise the district. West’s lawyers would have until 10 days after Tuesday — Nov. 30 — to file a contest of the election.

“Bottom line is, we are just starting,” Chris LaCivita, a top West strategist, wrote in an email. “Too early to take any options off the table.”