Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a new voting bill on Saturday allowing county canvassing boards and election supervisors to use automated equipment for machine and manual recounts. The bill controls the procedure for conducting a manual recount as well as when the ballots have to be processed through the automated equipment during a recount.

The Florida House and Senate unanimously approved the bill, which also: “[r]evises timeframes for testing of automated tabulating equipment; revises procedures governing canvassing of returns to specify usage of voting system’s automatic tabulating equipment; […] revises requirements for hardware or software used in manual recount; authorizes overvotes & undervotes to be identified & sorted physically or digitally in manual recount.”

This bill will not apply to the November 2020 elections, as it goes into effect in January 2021.

DeSantis signed the bill along with 14 others on topics such as nurse registries, trust funds, rental agreements, and fire prevention and control. He also vetoed a bill on public records.