LARGO, Fla. — Florida voters who have requested a vote-by-mail ballot for the August 18 primary election should have one in their hands within the next week.

Beginning today, supervisors of elections have a week to send out vote-by-mail ballots. In Pinellas County, that’s more than 320,000 ballots going out the door – nearly half of all voters registered in the county.

“Voters have really embraced voting by mail here in Pinellas County, and they really have for over a decade,” said Supervisor of Elections Julie Marcus, who was recently appointed to lead the office following the retirement of longtime supervisor of elections Deborah Clark earlier this year.

About-face for Democrats on vote-by-mail in Florida?

Under Clark’s leadership, Pinellas has been a leader in pushing vote-by-mail (previously described as absentee) ballots.

They already had more than 272,000 voters signed up to receive a vote-by-mail ballot going into the March 17 presidential primary election. However, after Marcus began sending out postcards encouraging voters to sign up for vote-by-mail in the past few months, there are now 320,000 registered voters expected to vote that way.

An elections reform bill passed by the Legislature in 2019 requires supervisors of elections to mail out such ballots between 33 and 40 days before the election, an increase of five days from previous law. Also, the latest a voter can request a vote-by-mail ballot is now ten days before the election – previously, it was six days.

When that bill was passed last year, some Democrats criticized it as being a form of “voter suppression,” saying that if it had been in place in 2018, more than 50,000 votes “would have been silenced.”

What a difference a year – and a pandemic — makes. Now, the Florida Democratic Party has embraced the current system and says it is dominating Republicans when it comes to getting their voters to request vote-by-mail ballots.

“Since the March 17 primary, Democrats have enrolled 350,000 Democrats into vote-by-mail compared to Republicans enrolling 160,000 more GOP voters into vote-by-mail. Democrats now have a 302,000 voter lead in vote-by-mail enrollments,” wrote Juan Penalosa, the executive director of the Florida Democratic Party, in a memo sent out on June 24.

Republican fears of fraud persist

Florida Republicans have dominated state politics for more than two decades, in part because of their success with mail-in ballots.

Yet now their titular head, President Donald Trump, has continued to cast doubt on the integrity of the mail-in ballot system in a series of tweets in recent months.

“I agree with the president,” says J.C. Martin, the Chairman of the Polk County Republican Party. “You see some of the other things like ballot harvesting, when people go around and may or may not be paying for people’s ballots and then taking an armload of them. That’s troubling.”

As PolitiFact notes, there have been some isolated cases of fraud associated with ballot harvesting, including in a North Carolina congressional race in 2018. But in the Sunshine State, both political parties have supported vote-by-mail efforts for years without a hint of scandal. 

“Florida’s in pretty good shape,” Martin says, adding that with reports of high levels of COVID-19 infections, “the reality is, some folks shouldn’t be out and about – and we encourage them (to vote by mail).”

Marcus says her office encourages every individual to vote by mail.

“Especially going into these elections this fall, considering the pandemic, voters can vote in the safety and comfort of their own home and allow for voters who have to vote in person the opportunity to vote in a safer environment,” she says, referring to poll locations on Election Day.

Her office will also offer 23 drop-off locations for vote-by-mail voters hesitant to drop their ballot off in a mailbox. 

Further expansion?

A lawsuit has been filed by several progressive groups seeking to expand the state’s vote-by-mail procedures. Among the demands those groups are making is to eliminate postage for mail-in ballots and extend the deadline to submit vote-by-mail ballots to the supervisors of elections.

Several counties around the state, including Hillsborough and Pinellas, have already announced that they will pay the postage for returning vote-by-mail ballots this year. The deadline for a vote-by-mail ballot to be counted is 7 p.m. on Election night. The lawsuit seeks to extend that deadline for a full week after the election. 

In his ruling denying a preliminary injunction for the plaintiffs last month, Federal Judge Robert Hinkle wrote that “the plaintiffs have not shown likely success on the merits.”

The jury trial in this case will take place in U.S. District Court in Tallahassee on July 20.