Collier County

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

Money & World

The Editorial Team · August 20, 2026

A plain light wood lectern with a slim gooseneck microphone stands at the front of a dim, windowless meeting room, facing rows of empty upholstered banquet chairs that recede into shadow. A loudspeaker on a stand is visible at the right against a dark panelled wall. No person, no signage, no place name and no lettering of any kind is in the frame. Illustration of the kind of public meeting room a canvassing board uses, not a photograph of this event. — Stock photo. Not the actual scene. *Photo: Nacho Gomez / Pexels*

What it changes

Two days ago the Marco Island bond referendum finished election night separated by a single vote, 2,257 yes to 2,256 no on 4,513 ballots cast on the question. The county has now put a clock on what happens next. The Supervisor of Elections posted a public notice on August 19 giving notice that the Collier County Canvassing Board is anticipated to order a recount of the City of Marco Island Referendum on Friday, August 21, following the issuance of the first unofficial results. The word anticipated is doing real work in that sentence and the notice is careful about it. A recount is not ordered by a press release. It is ordered by the canvassing board, after the first set of unofficial returns is issued, and the notice is written conditionally so that the public has lawful notice of meetings that will happen if the board does order one. What the notice does provide is the schedule, and the schedule is the useful part for anyone on Marco Island who wants to watch this rather than read about it afterwards. If the board orders the recount, four things happen on Friday. At 1:00 p.m. there is public testing of the tabulation equipment. At 1:30 p.m. the machine recount of the Marco Island referendum runs. At 3:30 p.m. the board issues the second unofficial results and makes the manual recount determination. At 4:30 p.m., if that determination goes the way a one vote margin points, there is a manual recount of the referendum. Certification is a separate meeting on Wednesday, August 26 at 9:00 a.m. All of it, the machine recount and the manual recount included, takes place at the Supervisor of Elections office at 3750 Enterprise Ave. in Naples, and all of it is a public meeting. Notice that the manual recount is on the schedule already, at a set hour, rather than being left as a contingency to be arranged later. That is the practical reading of a one vote margin. The manual recount threshold in Florida law is keyed to the second set of unofficial returns and to whether the number of overvotes and undervotes is smaller than the number of votes needed to change the outcome. On a margin of one, almost any quantity of Marco ballots that recorded no choice on the bond question, or recorded two, clears that bar, and those ballots then get looked at by people rather than by a scanner. The office has scheduled the room and the hour accordingly. The notice cites its own authority plainly, at section 102.141(7) of the Florida Statutes for the recount, at section 286.0105 for the advisory that anyone intending to appeal a decision made at the recount needs to ensure a verbatim record of the proceeding is made, and at Florida Administrative Code Rule 1S-2.031 for the posting. It gives (239) 252-VOTE as the contact number and carries a Spanish language line directing callers to the same customer service number. Accommodation requests are to be made at least an hour before a meeting. What is actually at stake has not moved. The question is whether the city may borrow up to 23 million dollars against its property tax base, over twenty years, for the Caxambas and Goldenrod bridge replacements and for repaving. The city's own figure for the full amount was 97 dollars a year on a home taxed at a million dollars. Nothing about Friday changes the size of the borrowing or what it buys. It decides whether the borrowing happens at all, and it decides it on a margin narrower than a single household. The one thing worth flagging for a reader who plans to follow this closely is the order of operations, because it is easy to read Friday as one event and it is three. The first unofficial results come first, and they are not the election night numbers; mail ballot cures and provisional ballots are canvassed in between. The machine recount comes second. The second unofficial results and the manual recount determination come third, and that is the point at which the overvote and undervote counts become public and the manual recount either happens or does not. A result that is stable across all three of those steps is a result. Anything announced before the last of them is an interim number.

The document: Collier County Supervisor of Elections, Public Notice of Canvassing Board Conditional Schedule and Recount Determinations, posted August 19, 2026.

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

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

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

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