How is Florida able to count so fast?

[sweetloukillbot]

70% in when the rest of the states have less than 10%? Not complaining, just amazed at the efficiency...

[Her Sister]

1. east coast finished first!?

[Agnosticsherbet]

2. It is probably the type of machines they use.

[GusBob]

3. Early voting

[MADem]

4. Early voting plus machines that read/count the vote as the paper ballot is fed in, maybe? nt

[spooky3]

5. Didn't they have a TON of early votes?

[MSMITH33156]

6. There is a ton of early voting in Florida

So those could be tabulated easily.

And after 2000 debacle, they went to a lot of automated machines which count fast.

Of course in 2012, none of this mattered because the Republican governor shortened early voting periods and it went til past midnight before people even finished voting, let alone had their vote counted.

[Princess Turandot]

7. one reason is that the polls there mostly closed at 7pm..

it wasn't officially called until 8pm because some of the panhandle is in the central time zone

[FloridaBlues]

8. The state got its act together after the mess in 2000 Bush v Gore mess

The state has spent millions to upgrade machines and reporting tally's

[MSMITH33156]

9. The funny thing is

they got their act together, and 2004 and 2008 were handled really well. Then in 2012, in an attempt to help Romney, the Republican governor Rick Scott intentionally lowered poll access and created a mess that never existed before. This caused huge lines and people were still VOTING after midnight cause they'd been in line over 5 hours.

But the machines and counting mechanisms are all top notch.

[OhZone]

10. They only count slow when a Bush is trying to steal something. nt

[MSMITH33156]

12. Correction*

In that case, they didn't count at all.

[OhZone]

13. Well, true. nt

[mcar]

11. Many of us take advantage

of early and absentee voting. Plus, the vast majority of the state's polls closed at 7 eastern. So the media was waiting for the Panhandle to close at 8. By then the populous areas had been closed for an hour.

[dlwickham]

14. they use their fingers AND toes