Floridians have to sign up again if they want to vote by mail in next election

Nearly 3 million Floridians voted by mail in 2022, but all of their ballot requests were wiped out at the beginning of this year because of a new law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

That has left county elections offices scrambling to tell residents they must request mail-in ballots again to cast their ballots in the same way for the next election.

DeSantis’ and other Republicans’ heightened targeting of mail-in voting marks an almost total 180-degree turn by the Florida GOP, who once spearheaded the idea and had benefited from it for two decades.

But now, opposition to voting by mail is rising on the right largely because of Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, with many national Republicans openly calling for its elimination. Democrats and elections experts worry even more restrictions are on the way in Florida.

“Every single year, there’s always an elections package,” said state Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando. “And there’s always some tactic to make it harder to vote.”

Jeremy Redfern, DeSantis’ press secretary, did not respond to a request for comment on whether more changes to voting by mail could be expected.

In Florida, voters now have to sign up again to get ballots by mail every two years instead of every four because of the new law.

That means people who received a mail-in ballot in 2022, which includes the nearly 2.8 million voters who used them in the general election last year as well as an additional 1.5 million who had signed up to receive a ballot but did not return it, “went down to zero,” on Jan. 1, said Orange elections supervisor Bill Cowles.

Mail-in requests started again from scratch just months before two March municipal elections in Orange County. Requests will again be zeroed out in January 2025, and every two years after that.

That quick turnaround could potentially result in many longtime mail-in voters not realizing they’re not getting a ballot until it’s too late.

Cowles’ office is attempting to inform voters they can sign up to get ballots mailed for November’s elections, which include Orlando municipal races and a special election to fill a vacancy in the state House. Voters have until 12 days before an election to sign up.

As of Thursday, less than 24,000 voters in Orange County had signed up to vote by mail, said Kasheem Traylor, who is in charge of the program. That’s compared with the 200,000 Orange County voters who received ballots in 2022, many of whom had signed up back during the 2020 presidential election.

“I think what all election administrators are trying to avoid is having a situation where the voter shows up at the polling place or early voting site and starts yelling, ‘You always sent me a vote by mail ballot,’” Cowles said. “‘Why didn’t I get my ballot?’”

Cowles said mail-in voting is especially important in Central Florida. “We are such a service industry community,” he said. “… This is not a community of retirees. It’s not a community that only works Monday through Friday, 8-5.”

GOP led the way

In Florida, it was Republicans who spearheaded voting by mail in 2002, passing legislation that a voter no longer needed an official excuse to cast what had been considered an “absentee” ballot.

“You can avoid long lines and vote from the convenience of your home,” Republican Gov. Jeb Bush said in a recorded message at the time.

“Republicans loved vote-by-mail, because they held an advantage on it,” Eskamani said. “But as soon as Democrats started overpowering them in vote-by-mail, it became demonized and canceled.”

When mail-in voting was expanded in many states in 2020 in response to the COVID pandemic, leading to increased Democratic turnout through the mail, Trump made it the centerpiece of the false claims of election fraud for which he has since been indicted twice in Washington, D.C, and Georgia.

“Mail ballots – they cheat,” Trump said in April 2020. “Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country because they’re cheaters. … They’re fraudulent in many cases.”

But Trump voted by mail himself in Palm Beach County in the GOP primary. Asked why, he said, “Because I’m allowed to.”

DeSantis, who at first praised how the 2020 election was conducted in Florida, soon began to push for “election integrity” and in 2021 signed the first of three elections bills aimed in part at restricting mail-in voting, including severely limiting the number of drop boxes where voters could return ballots.

In an interview earlier this month on NBC, DeSantis blamed Trump for the expansion of voting by mail.

“Why did we have all those mail votes? Because Trump turned the government over to Fauci,” DeSantis said of Anthony Fauci, a key White House pandemic adviser and former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “They did the CARES Act, which funded mail-in ballots across the country.”

Other GOP candidates have gone even further. Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who leads DeSantis in a recent Kaplan Strategies national primary poll, said this week that only “single-day voting on Election Day” should be allowed.

A Democratic shift

“The idea that people should be able to make time to vote, even if they don’t have time off from work or from school or have transportation on a Tuesday, that’s been around for quite some time,” said Daniel A. Smith, the chair of political science at the University of Florida. “And now there’s even stronger cries from conservatives to eliminate it altogether.”

Smith said the new rules could be considered “an effort to stem the massive increase in voting by mail by Democratic voters in Florida.”

In 2016 the parties were relatively even on that front, Smith said, with about 29% of Democratic voters casting ballots by mail compared with 30% of Republicans.

In 2020, however, 53% of Democrats who voted did it by mail, Smith said, while only 35% of Republicans did. In 2022, the difference became even more stark, with about 45% of Democratic votes cast through the mail compared with about 24% of Republicans.

“Democrats are quite alarmed because they have seen this movement,” Smith said. “And I think there’s evidence that these voters are not as willing to go to the polls in person, even post-pandemic.”

Pushing in-person voting

Republicans, meanwhile, are more confident that they’ll get their voters out in person, he said.

Older voters and white voters, who tend to be Republicans, are also more likely to own cars to get to the polls either for early voting or on Election Day.

Seminole supervisor Chris Anderson said the county had about 90,000 mail-in requests on file at the end of last year. This year, his office only had about 6,000 requests before it sent out a mailer and got about 27,000 more signups.

“People aren’t really paying attention,” Anderson said. “But hopefully, as we get closer to the election cycle, people sign up.”

In Osceola, elections office official Kari Ewalt said 80,000 mailers were sent out this year to everyone who received a mail ballot in 2022, leading to 24,000 sign-ups so far.

“Everywhere we go, we talk about it,” Ewalt said. “But there still seems to be people missing the message and are unaware of this, because they’re so used to it carrying over.”

Osceola ballots used to have a checkbox allowing a voter to easily renew their request for another four years.

“We’re not allowed to do that any longer,” she said. “And now they expire sooner.”

In Lake County, where supervisor Alan Hays said about 18,000 have signed up to vote by mail, he said comparing new two-year sign-ups to previous four-year periods was “comparing apples to tangerines, not even an orange.”

But he ultimately expected numbers to drop because the crisis of the COVID pandemic has largely passed.

“I suspect that we’re going to see a pretty sharp drop-off,” Hays said.

Smith said he could envision Florida returning to voters requiring an excuse to cast mail ballots, as is still the law in states such as Texas.

“I could certainly see efforts by DeSantis, if not the state Legislature, to put restrictions on who can vote by mail,” he said.

Eskamani also said there were lots of ways voting by mail could be further rolled back.

“You can shrink the application timeline, you can make the application timeline more complicated,” Eskamani said. “I would not be surprised.”