Hundreds of thousands of Florida voters had their requests for mail-in ballots cancelled last month, a consequence of a new law championed by Ron DeSantis.
The change is part of a suite of new restrictions on voting by mail – including new identification requirements and ballot drop box limits – Republicans passed after the 2020 election. Previously, Florida voters could elect to automatically receive a mail-in ballot for every election for up to four years. The new measure cancelled nearly all of the standing requests on file at the end of 2022. Voters can also now only request to automatically receive a mail-in ballot for up to two years.
The change has meant a huge drop in the number of people who are signed up to automatically receive a mail-in ballot. Local election officials have been working to get people to renew their requests by contacting them directly and by promoting the change on their websites. But in the first month since the reset, relatively few people have renewed their requests.
Republicans enacted the measure even though Florida regularly earns praise for having well-run elections and saw no major problems with voting in 2020. Voting by mail is popular in the state – about a third of voters used it in the 2022 general election. DeSantis has said the new restrictions are necessary to improve voter confidence, while voting advocates say that is a pretext for making it harder to vote.
In Miami-Dade county, 438,000 vote-by-mail requests expired on 1 January, according to data from the county’s supervisor of election office. As of 31 January, only 24,000 had renewed their mail-in ballot request.
In Hillsborough county, home to Tampa, the local election office sent a mailing to 316,000 voters in December letting them know their request was about to expire, said Gerri Kramer, a spokesperson for the office. By the end of January, the office had just under 49,000 vote-by-mail requests on file. In Orange county, which includes Orlando, nearly 3,500 requests were cancelled at the end of last year. So far 163 people have signed up.
All three counties said they were working to promote the change through social media and other advertising as well as contacting voters to make them aware they need to resubmit their request to receive a vote-by-mail ballot. “This will be an ongoing effort and we will continue to share information with voters as we get closer to our 2024 elections,” Kramer said.
“Eliminating standing vote-by-mail ballot requests for voters who have become accustomed to utilizing this mode of voting will undoubtedly lead to many of these voters – likely more than 1 million in Florida – not requesting a mail ballot in time,” said Daniel Smith, a professor at the University of Florida who is serving as an expert witness in a lawsuit challenging the law.
The new law will confuse people and dissuade them from voting, said Brad Ashwell, the Florida state director of All Voting is Local, a voter advocacy group that is part of a coalition urging local election officials to aggressively contact people and let them know they need to submit new vote-by-mail requests.
“Every time you add another one of these hoops people have to jump through or change the rules again, it’s gonna throw some people off and you’re gonna have some people have problems with that,” he said. “And those are gonna be people who typically, either they’re not heavily motivated to vote in the first place or they’re a more marginalized community that have problems voting and various other barriers in the way.”
Voters whose mail-in ballots requests were cancelled might not realize it in time for local elections happening in the next few months. “We’re all kind of all hands on deck trying to make sure people know they have to request one again if they want to vote by mail,” Ashwell said.
“We’ve been getting a lot of complaints from voters of all different political persuasions, saying ‘why is this changed?’” said Mark Earley, the supervisor of elections in Leon county, where about 40,000 vote-by-mail requests were cancelled because of the change. “What we’re hearing is a lot of concern and a bit of resentment for this change.”
When Republicans were pushing the law two years ago, at least one GOP lawmaker said lawmakers needed to quickly wipe out the advantage in mail-in ballot requests Democrats had amassed ahead of the state’s 2022 election. Republicans long used vote-by-mail in Florida, but during the pandemic in 2020, Democrats heavily emphasized voting by mail, building a solid vote-by-mail advantage in Florida. Republicans, including Donald Trump, said the process could not be trusted.
Not getting rid of the Democratic advantage would be “devastating”, Joe Gruters, the chairman of the Florida Republican party and a state senator, wrote to the Republican backing the bill in 2021. “We cannot make up ground. Trump campaign spent 10 million. Could not cut down lead.”
Lawmakers ultimately decided to leave existing requests in place through the 2022 general election, a contest in which DeSantis was overwhelmingly re-elected. The requests were instead wiped out at the start of this year.
Even if people can figure out how to renew their request, they face another new obstacle. Senate bill 90 also requires voters to provide a state ID number or the last four digits of their social security number when they request their ballot. If the number they provide isn’t on file with election officials, it could lead to more difficulty getting their ballot.
“Indeed, many eligible voters who had standing requests will not even be able to request a mail ballot because they do not have a current driver’s license or their social security number on file with their supervisor,” said Smith, the University of Florida professor.
“It’s a system, created by the Republican-controlled legislature and Governor DeSantis even though it was opposed by Republican and Democratic county elections officials, that’s designed to fail,” he added.
The reset came amid concern about even more changes to the vote-by-mail process. Last month, a working group of local election officials sent a report to the Florida department of state saying that the state should hold off on requiring voters to provide identification information on their mail-in ballot envelopes until after the 2024 election. Implementing the measure would be costly, potentially lead to voters having their ballots rejected, and slow the time it takes to report election results, the report noted.
Florida’s 67 supervisors of elections unanimously said the proposal was “unnecessary and lacking adequate feasibility for implementation”.
On Wednesday, the department of state appeared to somewhat heed that request. In its own report to the Florida legislature on potential changes to voting rules, it did not recommend the ID requirement on the mail-in ballot itself.
