Our news team was in the belly of the electoral beast
By Gretchen Cochran
Original Air Date: November 6, 2024
Host: WSLR News reporter Gretchen Cochran talked to the Sarasota Supervisor of Elections on election night, and she took a peek under the hood of the local elections apparatus.
Gretchen Cochran: The county election supervisor’s digs on Fruitville Road was a focal point for citizens and politicians Tuesday night. Various party honchos and even a couple candidates floated in and out, gathering, breaking voter tallies, then scurrying away to gatherings of their kin to either mourn or to celebrate.
Orchestrating it all was Ron Turner, leader of the band for two decades. Here he is describing the 280,000 Sarasota County voters.
GC: Standing here in the election center — that’s my term for it — and everybody is quiet and it’s coming alive.
Ron Turner
Ron Turner: There’s a lot. It’s a beehive of activity, it has been for weeks. With preparing equipment and opening vote-for-mail ballots and all of those sorts of things. So, we have hundreds of staff working and we’ll be working into the night and early morning trying to get everything back from the polling locations safely and securely.
GC: We’re seeing here just a few of the 1,000 volunteers and 30 full time people implementing this election. And the numbers were big.
RT: This is really a large turnout, 280,000 voters. That’s a record in Sarasota County, 84%. Now the percentage isn’t as high as some were back in 1992, I think we had 86%, but it is a record for the past several decades here in Sarasota County. So, very excited to see the turnout and the enthusiasm obviously that our voters have here in Sarasota County about making their voices heard.
GC: But their numbers are considered unofficial as there’s still a lot to do.
RT: We still have a lot of behind the scenes work to do.
GC: So we’re used to thinking the election is done maybe by tomorrow morning when we get results or even tonight, but that’s only the beginning for Ron, who will be working on getting — just quickly, tell us what you have to do next.
RT: Well, we will begin the process of rescanning all of our ballots here in Sarasota County through an audit system. So every ballot here has a secondary count. And that takes a lot of work, to run all of those hundreds of thousands of paper ballots back through that system. We have to look at overseas military. They have 10 days for their ballots to come back. We have provisional ballots, hundreds of those to look at. So there’s quite a few other things that we have in the coming days that we have. But tonight we’ll have a good idea. You’ll have the unofficial election results. And you will have a really good idea about all of these races and issues here in Sarasota County.
GC: And our results will go to the state, is it the 19th of November? Do I have that right?
RT: That’s when the election will be certified and we’ll send all our results, and the audit will be; then, we’ll finish. But we’re already sending results up this evening to the state of Florida. So as we’re getting results in, we’re publishing them for the public, but we’re also simultaneously sending them to the state of Florida.
GC: Then the president and vice president will be elected through the electoral college. Florida’s Republican electors will meet in Tallahassee to cast their votes, presumably for Donald J. Trump and J. D. Vance. They will take office January 20th.
This is Gretchen Cochran reporting for WSLR.
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