Voting by mail in Florida has in the past been beset by problems ranging from signature mismatches and delivery delays to tight deadlines.
Now, it could be the key to holding full elections if the state is still in the middle of a pandemic — and to avoid scenes like Wisconsin’s on Tuesday, where thousands lined up for hours wearing face masks after the state and U.S. Supreme Court rejected postponing a vote there.
Democrats and voting-rights groups in Florida and across the U.S. are pushing hard to make vote-by-mail as widespread as possible, especially after poll workers for the March 17 state presidential primary tested positive in Broward and Duval counties.
Congressional Democrats included billions of dollars for expanded vote-by-mail in their version of the coronavirus stimulus, most of which did not end up in the final bill but is still on the table for future ones.
A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll also showed 72 percent of all U.S. adults, including 79 percent of Democrats and 65 percent of Republicans, support universal mail-in ballots.
Meanwhile, President Trump and many Republicans are openly hostile to voting by mail, even as Republican governors and legislatures in states such as Ohio are moving forward with it and after Trump cast a mail-in ballot in Florida himself.
‘Next to impossible’
On Tuesday, Tammy Jones, president of the Florida Supervisors of Elections, asked Gov. Ron DeSantis to add more early voting sites, expand early voting to 22 days from a maximum of 14, and allow early voting sites to be open on Election Day to spread out voters. They also asked for more time to mail out vote-by-mail ballots and more time to count them.
But, she said in her letter, “Florida is not in a position, at this time, to conduct an all-mail ballot election.”
Florida allows any voter to be able to request a mail-in ballot, unlike in some other states that either don’t have vote-by-mail at all or require an excuse for an “absentee” ballot.
Jones, the Republican Levy County elections chief, told the Orlando Sentinel that “my first thought, as an individual supervisor, is that voting by mail is a great idea. But after talking to 67 supervisors throughout the state, all of different sizes and budgets, I really feel this year it’s next to impossible to go all vote-by-mail ballots.”
Large counties would need more time and money to acquire the proper equipment, including the number of $1 million specialty vote-by-mail counting machines necessary to process the ballots.
In 2016, the last presidential election, more than 9.6 million ballots were cast, and mail-in ballots were less than 30 percent of that number.
“If just for November? If the Legislature came in and changed the law, that’s doable,” said Steve Vancore, spokesman for Republican Broward supervisor Peter Antonacci. “We’d need a lot more money, but yes, it’s doable. But August[‘s primary election] is practically already upon us. … The infrastructure to conduct elections is enormous.”
‘A lot of myths’
Jones acknowledged some of the issues with voting by mail in the past. In 2018, about 10,000 people across the state saw their vote-by-mail ballots rejected by elections offices for mismatched signatures or other forms of “voter error,” according to University of Florida professor Daniel A. Smith.
Voters also had very little time to fix any signature problems, with the deadline the day before Election Day.
But in 2019, the Legislature extended the deadline to address signature issues and also allowed voters to drop off mail-in ballots at elections offices or early voting sites.
“There are a lot of myths out there that ‘voting by mail doesn’t count’ or it’s ‘throwing your ballot away’, and that’s just not true,” Jones said.
And she said the claims of large amounts of fraud using mail-in ballots also wasn’t true.
“There’s a lot of protections in place at both ends of the spectrum,” she said.
But Trump has been one of the biggest promoters of that conspiracy theory.
“Mail ballots – they cheat,” the president said at a news conference Tuesday. “People cheat. Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country because there’re cheaters. They go and collect them. They’re fraudulent in many cases.”
Trump was asked by a reporter how he could reconcile saying that while voting by mail himself in Palm Beach County.
“Because I’m allowed to,” Trump said.
State GOP chair Joe Gruters backed Trump in a statement Wednesday, saying that while the party “continues to encourage voters to vote by mail … We agree with President Trump that an all vote-by-mail ballot election is not feasible in Florida.”
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said there was no evidence that voting by mail opens the door to fraud.
“Voter fraud is already relatively rare,” Becker said. “Despite what the president said, Americans aren’t liars and cheats about voting.”
Voting by mail, Becker said, puts “a lot of validating information on the outside of envelopes. … You’ve got documents with home addresses, signatures, postmarks – I’ve got a lot of information there that makes me confident the ballot’s been filled out by the right person.”
‘The silent part out loud’
Trump’s tweet on Wednesday that vote-by-mail “doesn’t work out well for Republicans,” similar to other past comments, has also been criticized.
“He’s saying the silent part out loud that some of his motivation is he doesn’t want to maximize the voting population,” said Marge Baker, an executive vice president with the progressive group People For the American Way.
Republicans across the country have said similar things about vote-by-mail being bad for Republicans, Baker said, “but that’s not the case.”
Bill Cowles, Orange County elections supervisor and a Democrat, acknowledged in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel editorial board that there was a “great division” on voting by mail among fellow supervisors, “without getting into the political ramifications of the party in charge [Republicans] versus the party with the most registered voters [Democrats].”
But, Cowles said, for a long time in Florida, “it was always, ‘The Republicans will win vote-by-mail, the Democrats will go to the early voting, and then Republicans will go to the polls [on Election Day].’ That has changed, but nobody really knows how it breaks down.”
Thanks to a larger number of unaffiliated voters, “I’m not sure you can put the two-party labels on anymore,” Cowles said.
Becker pointed out that of the six states with the highest percentage of mail-in voters in 2018, all six had Republicans in charge of elections, and three of the states voted for Trump in 2016. Ohio, with a Republican governor and legislature, made its March primary mail-only, as did Democratic-controlled New York.
‘We did it’
At least one Florida county supervisor, meanwhile, said an all-vote-by-mail election worked just fine for her.
Last year, Volusia County held an all-mail special election to decide on a half-cent sales tax to fund public works projects. The county mailed out 401,000 ballots, and 27% of those eligible voted. The measure failed by 10 percentage points.
The county didn’t have to worry about poll workers calling in sick, a routine problem even before March’s primary amid the coronavirus crisis.
“For our county, it is doable,” said Volusia supervisor Lisa Lewis. “We did it.”