1 million drop in active Florida voters not a conspiracy, but it’s still bad news for Democrats

Florida saw a massive decline in active voters last year, with Democrats enduring the biggest drop as they attempt to bounce back from a landslide defeat in 2022.

The state had more than 1 million fewer active voters at the beginning of 2024 than it did a year earlier, including about 520,000 fewer Democrats and 500,000 fewer independents, but only about 160,000 fewer Republicans.

The huge reduction is largely due to new laws speeding up the process that moves active voters onto the inactive list. Being listed as inactive is still a step above being removed from the rolls entirely, and inactive voters can still vote and get their active status restored quickly.

But voting rights activists and analysts say it’s just one more burden placed on Florida voters by Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled Legislature. And it helps to pad the growing registration gap between Republicans and Democrats, which if inactive voters were included, would cut the GOP’s nearly 800,000 voter advantage over Democrats in half.

“There’s no question that two things have been going on,” said Daniel A. Smith, the political science chair at the University of Florida. “More Republicans have been registering than Democrats over the last two election cycles. That’s incontrovertible. … And the other is that more Democrats are exiting the voter file.”

Republicans also tend to be older and have more reliably active voters, which campaigns and parties focus on.

“So it could extenuate even greater problems for Democrats come November,” Smith said. “It’s kind of a self-fulfilling cycle of inactivity leading to greater inactivity.”

‘Just come back in’

The massive drop in active voters in Florida, especially among Democrats, has gained national and even international attention. It’s also become the focus of conspiracy theories.

A widely seen TikTok video claimed that more than half a million Democrats were “purged … because they know Florida women are about to put abortion rights [in] the Constitution in 2024.”

But Bill Cowles, Orange County’s elections supervisor, said the drop is due to a more rapid voter maintenance schedule, part of the multiple changes in election laws over the past two years.

“Yes, the number of actives has gone down,” said Cowles, a Democrat. “But the number of inactives is very large. And those are still eligible voters.”

Previously, elections offices would do “list maintenance” of the voter rolls every two years to find inactive voters. In 2022, the Legislature changed that maintenance schedule from every two years to yearly, except in the 90 days before a federal election.

In addition, the new laws changed how election offices dealt with voters who hadn’t cast ballots in the previous two federal election cycles, which this year would be the 2020 and 2022 general elections.

“In the past, we sent a notice to somebody who we had not heard from in a two-year period,” Cowles said. “And if they didn’t respond, then they just stayed on the roll. But the most recent change by the Legislature is if they don’t respond within [30 days], now they go to inactive status.”

Central Florida numbers

In Orange County, there were more than 80,000 fewer active voters than in January 2023, including nearly 38,000 Democrats and independents each and about 10,000 Republicans, according to the Florida Division of Elections, with third parties gaining a few thousand voters.

Lake County had 50,000 fewer active voters than in January 2023, including about 13,000 Republicans, 19,000 Democrats and 20,000 independents.

Alan Hays, the Lake County supervisor, said that while the changes to the law led to a “tremendous” amount of voters being listed as inactive, “it’s very important that people realize that is no cause for alarm.”

“To become active again, all they have to do is either show up to vote, or they make a phone call, send us an email, have some sort of contact with our office, and they will immediately be restored to active status,” said Hays, a Republican.

Only after staying inactive for another two federal elections would voters be removed from the rolls entirely. “But this first move, from active to inactive, is a very easy correction to make,” Hays said. “Just come back in, no problem.”

Osceola and Seminole counties saw fewer voters moved off of active status in 2023, at about 25,000 and 3,500 voters respectively, which supervisors attributed to less transient residents than in Orange and other bigger counties.

“In Orange County, we are a highly mobile community,” Cowles said. “People register to vote and they move and they don’t update their information. Or they got an apartment in Orange, and then went and bought a house in Osceola, Seminole, Lake, wherever, and they never re-registered over there.”

Osceola and Seminole also saw large disparities between parties in 2023, with about 500 Republicans being moved off of active status in Osceola compared to nearly 11,000 Democrats and 210 Republicans in Seminole compared to about 3,000 Democrats.

But both Democratic Osceola supervisor Mary Jane Arrington and Republican Seminole supervisor Chris Anderson said that was due to Democrats having a much lower turnout in 2022, triggering the shift to inactive status if they didn’t vote in 2020 as well.

“Republicans were more excited about the top of the ticket,” Arrington said of the DeSantis-Charlie Crist race for governor. “… And Democrats tend to be younger, just like [independents], and they don’t read their mail.”

Hays, one of the most vocal Republicans in the state against false claims of fraud, said Floridians should try to get their information about the election process from the source.

“There’s so much misunderstanding out there,” Hays said. “It’s a real shame that people don’t just take the time and call a supervisor’s office and get the straight answer.”

‘A focus on purging’

Smith, though, said he doesn’t think the tens of thousands being removed from the active rolls was a completely benign result of the new election laws, which were spurred in part by former President Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud in 2020 despite a smooth election in Florida that year.

“They’re all kind of working in tandem with each other,” Smith said of the controversial restrictions put in place, which include a severe reduction in drop boxes for mail-in ballots, limiting who can handle such ballots, and making registering college students more difficult.

The crackdown on third-party voter registration organizations, which has included fines for submitting applications incorrectly, has also damaged their ability to help voters update their status.

“There’s a reluctance for some of these groups to jeopardize their [members], who are out there not only registering new voters but updating individuals’ registrations,” Smith said.

Cecile Scoon, co-president of the League of Women Voters of Florida, said that all of these new regulations, “when they add up, make it more difficult for people to vote.”

“People who face these impediments with regards to the voter rolls, you never know if they’re going to have the ability to make it right,” Scoon said. “Some of the people [who are] told they’re inactive may be confused about what that means and feel that they cannot vote. And that just dissuades them from participating at all.”

Scoon also said DeSantis removing Florida from the multistate Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, in 2022 also had an impact.

“ERIC required you to facilitate bringing voters in and facilitate purging them if they hadn’t voted,” Scoon said. “It worked on both sides of the equation. And what’s going on in Florida right now is only a focus on purging.”

Targeting inactives

The huge drop in Democratic and independent active voters, even if from routine maintenance, comes as the state enters the 2024 presidential election year. And party politics looms over everything.

With the Democratic Party’s Florida presidential primary canceled after only President Joe Biden was submitted as a candidate, the August U.S. Senate primary will be the next big vote for Democrats statewide.

“It will be a very important election in terms of getting Democrats back in the habit of turning out to vote because they fell off the ledge in 2022,” Smith said. “There’s no question about that. … The front lines are not great for Democrats.”

Samuel Vilchez Santiago, the Orange County Democratic chair, said his organization worked hard to reach out to inactive Democrats before the Jan. 16 special election for state House District 35, won by Democrat Tom Keen, as well as the Orlando elections in November.

“Overall, it’s been a mixed response,” Vilchez Santiago said. “Some people have responded positively, some people have let us know they’ve actually moved out of the state. But it’s one of our main priorities to make sure inactive Democrats know that there’s an election coming up.”

In the end, Smith said, while inactive voters are not as reliable as active voters, they can be spurred to the polls when truly motivated. That might give Democrats pause as well as hope.

“The one time we saw that in recent history was in 2016,” Smith said. “Inactive Republicans came out to vote for Donald Trump.”

State GOP chair Evan Power and the Orange County Republican Party did not return requests for comment on this story.

How to check voter status

Voters can check their active status by contacting their county elections office or visiting its website. If listed as inactive, they can update their status with the office immediately. Inactive voters can also show up at the polls during early voting or on Election Day and update their status to active.