18K mail-in ballots were rejected in Fla. primary
Report shows a greater danger of legitimate votes not being counted
A new report estimates 18,000 mail-in ballots were rejected in Florida in the March presidential primary, and more than 558,000 rejected nationwide during the 2020 primaries.
The report, which comes amid attempts by President Donald Trump to inaccurately portray mail-in voting as “fraud,” instead shows a much greater danger of legitimate ballots not being counted.
The report, by National Public Radio, showed a much higher number of rejections during this year’s presidential primaries than the 318,000 rejected in the 2016 November election. Because of the coronavirus, many people turned to mail voting this year for the first time.
Eight states out of the 30 in the study had higher rejection numbers than Florida, including much smaller states such as Kentucky, Maryland and Wisconsin.
The Florida number is large —
especially in a state known for close results in big statewide elections. The winner and loser in the 2018 U.S. Senate race were separated by 10,033 votes and the race for governor was decided by 32,462.
Though large a large number of ballots was rejected, almost all were counted. The number rejected in the presidential primary works out to 1.3% of the 1.4 million mail ballots cast in the March 17 primary statewide.
Florida changed its mailin process after an estimated 20,000 ballots were rejected in the 2018 general election, either because of an alleged signature mismatch, late arrival at elections offices after Election Day, or having no signature on envelopes.
Because of the post-2018 changes, the problem of mail ballots not getting counted because of missing signatures or signatures that don’t match isn’t as large as many people believe, Broward Supervisor of Elections Peter Antonacci said in an interview before the August primaries.
“It’s a misdirected anxiety,” he said
Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link said 237 ballots weren’t counted in the presidential primary because voters didn’t sign them or the signatures
didn’t match their voter registrations. That works out to 0.26% of the county’s 89,492 presidential primary ballots.
In last week’s state and local primaries and nonpartisan elections, 0.36% of Palm Beach County’s 183,268 ballots weren’t counted because of missing or mismatched signatures.
Antonacci’s spokesman didn’t immediately have the presidential primary ballot numbers on Tuesday afternoon.
For last week’s state and local primaries and nonpartisan elections, 303 Broward ballots weren’t counted because of missing or mismatched signatures. That works out to 0.14% out of 212,985 mail ballots that were counted.
Antonacci has said ballots that don’t get counted because they arrive after the deadline are a bigger problem. By the end of the day Monday, spokesman Steve Vancore said, 2,584 ballots arrived after the Aug. 18 deadline.
After 2018’s problems, the Legislature passed a law giving voters more time to fix mistakes, such as missing or non-matchning signatures, but other issues remain. Each election, mail ballots are rejected because they don’t arrive back at county elections offices on time. Florida has a strict 7 p.m. Election Day deadline, and postmarks don’t count.
Between the 2016 and the 2020 presidential primaries, the use of voting by mail in Florida jumped by
more than half, said, going from 30% of the vote in 2016 to 46% in 2020, according to University of Florida professor Daniel A. Smith.
“What my research has been showing, along with [professor] Michael Herron at Dartmouth, is that experience matters,” Smith said. “And so across race and ethnicity and party, people who haven’t voted by mail in past elections are much more likely to have their vote-bymail ballot rejected, either for a signature issue, or because it’s late.”
Smith added that people who voted in person in 2016 and ’18 general elections, who then voted by mail in the 2020 presidential primary, were about twice as likely to have their ballot rejected than those who voted by mail in the 2016 and ’18 general elections.
Some of the reasons, Smith said, include two different standards when it comes to signatures for mail-ins and in-person voting. A signature on an ID used by a poll worker to verify a voter in person may be nothing like the signature on a voter’s registration file used to verify a mail-in ballot.
“The whole process is different in terms of how you identify yourself,” Smith said.
New mail-in voters may not also know about Florida’s strict Election Day deadline. South Florida counties pay for return postage, but not all counties do that.
“They may not realize that their county requires them to have postage,” Smith said. “They might not realize that sending mail even a week before Election Day may not get back by 7 p.m. on Election Day to the supervisor. … There are a lot of intricacies of voting by mail that can trip inexperienced voters up.”
Steve Schale, a Florida Democratic strategist, 2008 Florida Obama campaign director and longtime backer of party presidential candidate Joe Biden, said he expects the rejection issue to be huge in the upcoming November election.
“You have a lot of voters who, for very legitimate reasons, would want to vote at home [by mail] this cycle,” Schale said. “They don’t want to go to the polling location, they don’t want to take the chance. … Our encouragement to people has been, ‘The day you get your ballot, turn around and mail it. It may take a day or two longer, but it’s going to get there.‘”
The issue isn’t that different from what the Obama campaign dealt with in 2008, he said, when Florida passed a voter ID law.
“Our response to that was, you can light your hair on fire and be angry about it, … or you can say, ‘Hey, this is the deal: If you want to vote, you’ve got to have an ID, and here’s how you get an ID and here’s what IDs you can take,‘” Schale said. “And we spent an immense amount of money as a campaign doing voter education that cycle, and I think that’s kind of where we are now.”
Smith said Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting, despite his late declaration that Florida’s system alone was “tried and true,” is causing more Republicans to forego voting by mail. But Democrats might also get worried amid news reports of an alleged slowdown at the Post Office.
“One of the virtues we have a voting in Florida is we have three really good processes available to voters, all three of which have been tried and true,” Smith said. “I think a lot of voters are going to take advantage of [early voting]. … And we’ve seen the expansion of secure drop boxes [for mailin ballots] that take the post office out of the equation. Yeah, you might have to wait in the line, but you’re probably in the security of your car.”
And despite coronavirus concerns, Smith said, “voting in person on Election Day is really necessary for a lot of folks who waited to the last minute. … Voters do consider the costs and benefits of the different [choices] that we have.”