After a final recount, Nancy Bostock emerged as the winner of Pinellas County's district 6 school board race, beating her opponent Amanda Lord by a mere seven votes.
The district encompasses Pinellas Park, Seminole and the coastline from Indian Shores to Fort de Soto.
Bostock, 57, is the chief executive officer of Chemical Standards Laboratory, and she served as a Pinellas County School Board Member from 1998 to 2008. She'll be replacing sitting board member Stephanie Meyer who decided not to seek reelection.
Read More: Meet the candidates: Pinellas County School Board
Initial election results from Tuesday's primary showed Bostock pulling ahead with a razor thin margin of two votes . A total of more than 42,100 votes were cast.
Then, on Thursday, after another batch of provisional and cured ballots were reviewed, Bostock's lead increased to 7 votes.
The curing process allows voters to correct issues, such as nonmatching signatures, on their ballots in order to be counted. The county's canvassing board decides which ballots can be counted.
With a difference, still, of 0.00005 percentage points between the two candidates Thursday night, the race was well within the threshold for a recount.
Florida election law requires a machine recount if the margin is less than or equal to 0.5% of the total votes for office. If the machine recount returns a margin less than or equal to 0.25%, a manual recount is triggered.
Bostock and Lord oversaw the recount process, according to Pinellas County Elections spokesperson, Ashley McKnight-Taylor.
Machine and manual recounts confirms Bostock win
The machine recount of the more than 42,000 ballots began at 9 a.m. Friday.
More than 5,800 ballots were flagged as either undervotes or overvotes in that process, and were sent for a manual recount.
Undervotes are ballots that the machine registers as having no candidate marked for that particular office. An overvote is the opposite, where the machine registers more than one choice filled in for that office.
During the manual recount, a set of human eyes might determine that there was voter intent on a ballot the machine counted as blank, said McKnight-Taylor.
Those ballots reviewed by the counting team are then sent to the canvassing board for a determination.
The final results from the recount process were posted at around 5 p.m. Friday.
Two additional votes ended up being added to both candidate's tallies, meaning Bostock remained in the lead with seven votes.
Bostock posted on her campaign Facebook page that she was honored to be the next district 6 representative. She thanked voters, election workers and her opponent for a "positive discussion about the future of our schools."
"Sometimes, elections are decided by very small margins. It only reinforces the resilience of our electoral process and the passion of local residents who care deeply about their community and the public officials entrusted to represent them," wrote Bostock.
Meanwhile, incumbent Lisa Cane won the district 2 at-large seat.
The district 3 race is headed to a runoff between incumbent Dawn Peters and newcomer Curtis Campogni.
