Collier County

Marco Island's 23 million dollar bond question now stands at a single vote with every precinct in Collier County counted, and the fifteen ballots that closed the gap since the earlier count were every one of them mail ballots

Money & World

The Editorial Team · August 19, 2026

Rows of empty dark wooden chairs with woven rush seats, set out in long lines across the bare concrete floor of a dim hall and photographed from above and to one side. A pale strip of flooring runs between two blocks of seating like an aisle. Every chair is unoccupied. No person, no signage, no place name and no ballot is in view. — Stock photo. Not the actual scene. *Photo: Adrien Olichon / Pexels*

What it changes

Three hours ago the Marco Island bond question was separated by four votes. It is now separated by one. The Collier County Supervisor of Elections updated its preliminary summary at 8.21 p.m. and the referendum reads 2,257 yes to 2,256 no on 4,513 ballots cast on the measure, with all three of the city's precincts in. Countywide the page now reports 67 of 67 precincts, and it marks election day, early voting and vote by mail each as completely reported. Turnout finished at 26.4 percent on 69,153 ballots cast against 262,142 registered voters. The interesting part is where the movement came from. Fifteen more ballots have been counted on the Marco question since the earlier figures, six of them yes and nine of them no, and all fifteen were mail ballots. The election day columns are unchanged at 758 no to 522 yes, and the early voting columns are unchanged at 723 no to 489 yes. Only the mail column moved, from 1,240 yes and 766 no to 1,246 yes and 775 no. Mail is the side of this electorate that has favoured the bond throughout, and yet the last tranche of mail ballots broke against it, nine to six. That is a small enough sample to be noise. It is also the reason the yes side is now ahead by one vote rather than four. What follows is a process, and the thresholds are worth stating precisely because there are two of them. Section 102.141(7) of the Florida Statutes provides that where unofficial returns show a measure on the ballot was approved or rejected by one half of a percent or less of the votes cast on that measure, a recount shall be ordered, and that for races other than federal, state and multicounty ones the county canvassing board or the local board responsible for certifying the election is the body that orders it. One vote out of 4,513 is 0.02 percent. Note also what the statute does not offer here: the written request that a recount not be made is available to a defeated candidate, and a ballot measure has no candidate to make it. The second threshold is the one a one vote margin puts in play. Section 102.166(1) provides that where the second set of unofficial returns shows a measure approved or rejected by one quarter of a percent or less, a manual recount of the overvotes and undervotes shall be ordered, unless the number of overvotes and undervotes is fewer than the number of votes needed to change the outcome. On a one vote margin that exception has almost nothing left to bite on. Any meaningful number of Marco ballots that recorded no choice on the bond question, or recorded two, would exceed the votes needed to change the result, and those ballots would then be looked at by a person rather than a machine. None of this is settled tonight, and the page still carries the word preliminary at the top of it. Vote by mail cures and provisional ballots are canvassed after election night, the canvassing board meets publicly to do that work, and the second set of unofficial returns is what the manual recount threshold keys to rather than the numbers on the screen this evening. A reader on Marco Island should take exactly one thing from tonight: the question of whether the city may borrow up to 23 million dollars against its property tax base is, as of the latest count, one vote from going either way, and it will be decided by a canvassing process over the coming days. The money at stake has not changed. The city put the cost of the full 23 million at 97 dollars a year on a home valued at a million dollars, and the borrowing is for the Caxambas and Goldenrod bridge replacements and 36 lane miles of paving. Across the county line the comparison still holds: Bonita Springs approved 35 million dollars of rail trail bonds 68.28 percent to 31.72 percent, a result no recount provision reaches. One of these two cities knows what it decided. The other is waiting on a margin of one household's worth of votes.

The document: Collier County Supervisor of Elections, 2026 Primary Election preliminary summary results, page updated 8:21 p.m. August 18, 2026.

Marco Island's 23 million dollar bond question now stands at a single vote with every precinct in Collier County counted, and the fifteen ballots that closed the gap since the earlier count were every one of them mail ballots

A capsized boat sighted about ten miles off Marco Island on Thursday afternoon pulled marine units from four Collier County agencies out to it after an aircraft crew reported what looked like a person on or near the hull, and the crews found the vessel abandoned with no emergency taking place

The Marco Island borrowing survived its recount by the same single vote that carried it on election night, and the county's second unofficial count now stands at 2,259 to 2,258

Collier County has posted the schedule for the Marco Island bond recount, and it runs the machine count at half past one on Friday afternoon with a manual recount of the disputed ballots pencilled in for three hours later

Marco Island's 23 million dollar bond question is separated by four votes with all three of its precincts counted, a margin far inside the half a percent that forces a recount under Florida law