Convenience, with a caveat
Mail voters told to put information on outside of ballot envelopes, where it can be seen — or taken — by anyone
Floridians voting by mail in 2020 elections are being asked to put their email addresses and home and mobile phone numbers, along with their signatures, on the outside of the ballot envelopes they mail back to the elections office — allowing the information to be seen and harvested by anyone who comes in contact with the envelope.
The request for contact information was added by the Legislature and governor last year as part of a wide-ranging law that changed several aspects of the way Florida elections are run.
Signatures have long been required on the outside of mail ballot envelopes, which used to be called absentee ballots. The new information request, plus the signatures on the envelopes, is “not very security hygienic,” said Susan Grant, director of consumer protection and privacy at the Con
sumer Federation of America.
“I think it’s a really stupid idea. And I can’t even understand the rationale for it, quite frankly. That’s the sort of information that … should be inside the secure envelope, not outside for anybody to see it,” Grant said.
Any bits of information from one source can be combined with information from other places to access peoples’ accounts and impersonate them for various fraudulent purposes, she said. “Your signature could easily be scanned by somebody using a $150 scanner and then affixed to various documents as though it was you signing.”
A handful of voters have objected to the addition of contact information since they began receiving vote-by-mail ballots for the March 17 presidential primaries and local government elections, said Broward Supervisor of Elections Peter Antonacci in Broward and Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link.
“If you put it on the outside of the envelope that goes into the mail system, anybody who gets it can actually scam you,” said Marco Cirrincione, of Tamarac, who’s been voting by mail for the past decade. “Why is this on the outside? It just didn’t make any sense to me. It seems like they would have used their brains instead of doing it the way they did.”
Marty Ireland, a Democratic committeeman from Plantation, said he started wondering the same thing when his sister called and told him to look at his vote-bymail packet. Ireland, a retired letter carrier and former president of the National Association of Letter Carriers branch 2550, said letter carriers are sometimes robbed, and stolen ballots could be a source of valuable information.
Discussions among the network of elections supervisors in the most populous counties showed the only concerns are coming from Palm Beach and Broward, Link said. “[The concern] is pretty unique to Palm Beach and Broward County,” Link said.
Bill Cowles, the supervisor of elections in Orange County, said his office hasn’t received complaints about the additional information request, which was also used last year in Orlando city elections.
Antonacci, Cowles and Link said voters who are concerned don’t have to add the contact information — though they must sign the ballot.
In Broward, voters are told if they have “any concerns whatsoever about their privacy, that filling in this information is an option and not a requirement,” Antonacci said.
Link said Palm Beach County voters are told the same thing. “It is not required. If you choose not to do it, it is not going to invalidate your vote. Your vote will still count as long as you’ve signed it and your signature matches,” she said.
But there’s a catch. Lawmakers added the contact information to improve the process for supervisors of elections to contact voters who forget to sign their ballots or whose signatures have changed. Ballots with missing or faulty signatures aren’t counted.
Not including the contact information increases the chances that a voter can’t be reached in a timely manner to fix the ballot, Antonacci said.
“The concern was that so many ballots arrive late in the process and mail is simply too slow to let the voter know their ballot will not count because of a deficiency, like no signature, the wrong address etc.,” Antonacci said by email. “The hope is that with allowing voters to voluntarily (again, it is not a requirement) get us the most up-to-date contact information, we can reach back out quickly and facilitate making the correction to help ensure that their ballots will indeed count — after all, that is our goal.”
Link said elections workers would search for phone numbers and emails when there isn’t contact information, even seeing if they can track down people via Facebook. She advised anyone who doesn’t add the contact information to track the status of the ballot, either online or by calling the elections office if they don’t have internet access. People can check the status of their vote by mail ballots at registration.elections.myflorida.com.
Cowles said people also have the option of putting the return envelope in another envelope, making sure it’s addressed correctly, and return that to the elections office.
John Ziegler, a Democratic committeeman from northeast Plantation, said he understands the concerns from people like Ireland, but he thinks the benefit to voters who can get contacted if there’s a ballot problem outweighs any risk that people can find email addresses or phone numbers, which are widely available on Google and Facebook.
“From my point of view, it’s not a problem,” he said. “To me, it could possibly be a positive. If there’s some question about their vote by mail ballot, it could save it from being discarded.”
There’s no immediate prospect for change.
“It is required by the statute,” Link said. “It’s required to be on the envelope.”
After the primary, Antonacci said, “our team will review and evaluate the breadth and depth of this concern and consider options, potentially including in boldface type that the email and phone number are optional.”
State Sen. Dennis Baxley, ROcala, chairman of the Ethics and Elections Committee, said this week the requirement that the information go on the outside of the envelope doesn’t make sense, adding he hadn’t heard about the issue until he was asked this week.
“It is certainly appropriate to review this for people’s security and safety,” Baxley said. “I would definitely be interested in making sure people’s personal information was safe. It looks like it would be that simple if you just provide another envelope.”