Separated by 2 votes, Pinellas school board race heads to a recount
Tampa Bay Times | By: Jeffrey S. Solochek | August 19, 2026
Pinellas County residents wanting to know who won the District 6 school board seat representing south-central county will have to wait until at least Friday.
The race between former board member Nancy Bostock and political newcomer Amanda Lord is headed to an automatic recount after a nailbiter of a race that’s closer than anyone can recall in recent history.
With more than 42,000 votes cast, Bostock held a two-vote lead as of Wednesday morning. The question is, will that margin stand after the Friday morning review?
The race for Pinellas County school board District 6 came down to two votes, triggering an automatic recount.
The race for Pinellas County school board District 6 came down to two votes, triggering an automatic recount.“I’ve never seen an election so close,” Lord said Wednesday morning, after watching the tallies shift overnight. “Now we have to let the elections office follow their recount process.”
Bostock said she’d be watching the recount closely.
“Looks like this former social studies teacher has become a civics lesson,” she said Wednesday. “Every vote counts.”
Here’s how the District 6 race is set to play out.
First, the county canvassing board will gather at 5 p.m. Thursday to determine whether another set of mail and provisional ballots should be included in the count.
“We aren’t sure exactly how many of those are outstanding that are relevant to this contest,” said Ashley McKnight Taylor, spokesperson for the Pinellas elections office. “We might see a shift in the contest” that brings the candidates closer or further apart.
Friday morning, the canvassing board will meet again to hold the recount as required when a race is separated by 0.5% of the votes or less. First will come a mandatory machine count. If, after that, the results are still separated by 0.25% or less, the canvassing board will order a hand count.
That manual recount would take into consideration only the ballots tagged by the machines as undercounts — those with no candidate selected — and overcounts — those with both candidates selected, deputy supervisor Dustin Chase said.
The office has scheduled six teams of two, made up of a balance of Republicans, Democrats and no-party voters, to look over the documents. The canvassing board will decide disputes, with the candidates or their representatives able to oversee the process.
At the end of the recount, a winner will be determined, no matter what.
“Even if it’s a dead tie, they’re not going to a revote,” Chase said.
If the two do end up deadlocked, state law requires them to “draw lots” to determine who wins.
Don’t ask specifically what drawing lots means, though. County officials are discussing that concept, with ideas that include drawing cards from a deck or rolling dice.
“We’re going to have options,” Chase said.
As the recount approaches, observers have discussed how the election arrived at this crossroads. Four years ago, the same district saw a six-point spread between two candidates with much more pronounced political and philosophical differences.
“I’ve never seen anything like this, and this shows exactly why voting is so important in primary elections. Because these are people making local decisions about our schools,” said parent activist Tammy Kaplan, who volunteered for Lord’s campaign.
She said she watched the tally shift from early in the evening, when Lord led by close to 1,000 votes, to Bostock moving ahead by a couple hundred votes before her lead ultimately narrowed to two votes.
McKnight Taylor said the ups and downs tracked with the elections office processing a large number of mail ballots that got delivered to the headquarters at the end of Tuesday night. They required signature verifications before tabulation, which did not begin until close to midnight.
“That’s why you saw the shift,” she said.
The closeness seemed to carry a message, said former board member Carol Cook, a Bostock supporter who retired in 2024 after six terms in office.
She noted that the candidates ran completely different styles of social media campaigns, with Bostock setting herself up as an experienced insider and Lord defining herself as a fresh voice with new ideas.
And yet they wound up nearly dead even.
“That’s why it is so important that once you are elected, you are taking the whole district into consideration,” Cook said. “It has to be, now politics are put aside, and how are you going to best serve students.”
The remaining question is who will sit in that seat. As Lord said, “It’s not over until it’s over.”
