Republican plan would eliminate almost all mail voting in Florida

A state senator who is one of the Republican Party’s leaders on voting issues has introduced legislation that would all-but-eliminate mail voting in Florida, affecting millions of people who’ve come to prefer filling out their ballots at home rather than lining up at polling stations.

State Sen. Blaise Ingoglia of Spring Hill, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, filed the measure Friday evening as lawmakers rushed to introduce their ideas before Tuesday’s start of the annual legislative session.

If passed, Senate Bill 1752 would end virtually all mail voting. It would return Florida to the old absentee voting system, restricting mail ballots mostly to people who are away from their home counties during early voting or on Election Day.

“It’s a bad idea,” said Broward Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott, a Democrat, who said mail voting is especially beneficial for working-class voters and people with family obligations. “There are lots of reasons people may not be able to go to the polls in person, and mail voting gives those people the ability to participate.”

Sean Foreman, a political scientist at Barry University, said the idea of scaling back mail voting “doesn’t seem to fix any problems. It just seems to limit choices for voters.”

“It’s ridiculous. Florida was ahead of the curve by moving to no-excuse, mail-in voting 20 years ago,” Foreman said. “The rest of the country started to catch up due to circumstances during the pandemic, while Florida already had a robust vote-by-mail system in place, and that allowed us to have a successful election administration during the pandemic.

“To turn back the clock and go back to the antiquated system really makes no sense at all unless you want to stop people from voting,” Foreman said.

He said mail voting has another advantage: It allows people to take more time to review the candidates and questions on the ballot, he said.

Popular

Whether it’s convenience for time-starved people, wanting to avoid haranguing by political activists outside polling places, or more time to study their choices — or a combination — many Florida voters love casting their ballots from their couches or kitchen tables.

Mail voting has exploded in popularity in the two decades since Florida jettisoned the old absentee ballot system and implemented no-excuses mail voting in the aftermath of the contentious 2000 presidential election.

In the 2022 midterm elections, 2.8 million Florida voters used mail ballots — including 225,683 in Broward and 221,087 in Palm Beach County — more than a third of the 7.8 million who voted.

In the 2020 presidential election, 4.9 million Floridians voted by mail, including 474,404 in Broward and 387,830 in Palm Beach County.

Republican advantage

For most of the last two decades, voting by mail was a potent advantage for Florida Republicans, who used it much more than Democrats — and have expanded their dominance of the state. Republicans hold all statewide elected offices, dominate the Florida congressional delegation, and control supermajorities in the state Senate and House of Representatives.

“The Republican Party has been great at getting their voters to vote by mail up until Donald Trump started to criticize this method of voting,” Foreman said. “It gave them advantages in mobilizing voters because the Republican Party was so good at using data analytics to track those voters and turn in their ballots.”

In every election from 2002 through 2018 Republicans in Florida used mail ballots more than Democrats.

In 2016 and 2018 — years in which Ingoglia was chairman of the Republican Party of Florida — Republicans cast more vote-by-mail ballots than Democrats, though their advantage had declined somewhat by then compared to prior election cycles.

Mail voting preferences shifted toward the Democrats starting in 2020. During the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, Democrats — who polling showed were more concerned with Republicans about COVID — moved en masse to voting by mail. During the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, Democrats were much more likely to eschew any in-person voting at regional early voting centers for neighborhood polling places on Election Day.

At the same time, then-President Donald Trump spread unfounded allegations that mail voting was plagued by fraud. His attacks on mail voting increased skepticism among Republican voters on the process. Florida has had sporadic instances of fraud connected with mail-in ballots, but nothing on the scope described by the former president, according to a range of government officials, political analysts and partisan campaign operatives.

Election security

Ingoglia would do away with mail voting as it’s been used in the last two decades, making absentee voting available to people who would be out of their home counties during early voting or on Election Day, or who are unable to get to a polling place to vote because of a limited number of additional circumstances, such as illness, disability, hospitalization, or the need to care for someone who is ill or disabled.

A voter seeking a mail ballot would have to provide the basis for the request to the county elections office.

Returns of mail ballots also would be limited. Besides the mail, they could be returned to “an authorized ballot intake station located at the office of the supervisor of elections of the county.” It would eliminate use of ballot intake stations at all early voting locations.

Ingoglia said he wants to reduce the potential for voter fraud.

“In light of elections being overturned by judges because of vote by mail fraud, and nearly 1 in 5 voters admitting to committing voter fraud, it’s time Florida stops the practice of no-excuse vote by mail, which have proven to be the least secure. My proposal is to go back to voting in person with expanded early voting. In addition, in order to make our elections as secure as possible, we need to audit precincts via hand recount to make sure the voting tabulation machines are accurately counting votes,” Ingoglia said in a statement emailed by a spokesperson.

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The “voters admitting” fraud is reference to information from a poll commissioned by the Heartland Institute, a conservative and libertarian think tank, by Rasmussen Reports, a conservative polling organization.

The expansion of early voting he referred to is a provision of his bill that would require county supervisors of elections to offer 14 days of early voting. Some counties offer fewer days, though the big South Florida counties already offer the maximum 14 days.

During all the time of no-excuses vote by mail, elections in Florida have been overseen by Republican secretaries of state and supervisors of elections of both parties elected in each county.

Yet after the 2020 election, as Trump’s repeated assertions about voter fraud drove concern among some voters in the Republican Party’s base, the Republicans who control the Florida Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis responded by tightening the rules.

Among the changes already implemented:

• Voters requests for mail ballots don’t last as long and need to be renewed more frequently.

• Drop boxes run by supervisors of elections were restricted and had to be monitored more closely.

• Limits were imposed on the number of completed ballots that could be legally in one person’s possession, a moved aimed at combating so-called “ballot harvesting.” Ballot harvesting is collecting and turning in a mail ballot on behalf of someone else if a voter wants to use the ballot to vote at home but can’t get to an official drop-off site or doesn’t want to use the Postal Service.

• People applying for mail ballots have to supply either a driver license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number to the county elections office for verification.

Also, Scott said, the signature on the envelope used to return a mail ballot has to match the registered voters’ signature on file.

“The security level has gone up since 2020. If anything, at least give the new systems a chance and see if the new systems are going to work out before trying to introduce new legislation and continuing to try to make changes to vote by mail,” Scott said. “It’s going to be extremely difficult for anybody to be able to cheat with the new system.”

Scott said Monday he hadn’t yet seen a copy of Ingoglia’s proposal and couldn’t comment about its specifics. Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link, reached on her way to an event, said she had done a quick read but couldn’t immediately offer an analysis of the legislation.

Foreman said it is “a myth that a lot of voter fraud is happening out there.”

“There is not widespread evidence of a problem. There are always small, isolated incidents in each election of potential voter fraud, and those are handled by the legal system. And I think there’s been so much scrutiny on voting methods in recent years that systems are in place to catch unauthorized voters,” Foreman said.

Democrats respond

Democratic lawmakers denounced the move in pre-session news conferences on Monday.

State Sen. Lauren Book of Broward, the state Senate Democratic leader, termed it “disenfranchisement.”

State Sen. Jason Pizzo, who represents parts of Broward and Miami-Dade counties, said the Democratic Party is “proficient and good at vote-by-mail so they (Republicans) look to see where our strengths are and try to attack them.”

State Sen. Shevrin Jones, a Miami-Dade County Democrat, called it “a massive attack on our rights.”

Jones, who is a member of the Democratic National Committee and founder of Operation BlackOut, an effort to encourage minority Floridians to vote by mail, said it is part of a long-running effort.

“Florida Republicans have pushed voter-suppression bills to limit the participation of certain communities. Now they are trying to make it even harder for voters to get an absentee ballot despite the proven security and safety of voting by mail,” Jones said. “These restrictions are a massive attack on our rights. Voting is a fundamental right in this country and it should be a fundamental right in this state.”

Ingoglia dismissed the objections, pointing to the Democrats’ decision not to have a presidential preference primary this year in Florida. “Florida Democrats have canceled their own Presidential primary in Florida effectively disenfranchising millions of Democrat voters who now have ZERO choice. That’s what third-world countries do. That’s true disenfranchisement and an unparalleled attack on voting rights.”

Republicans aren’t opposed to all voting by mail.

In November, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel announced the leadership team for the Florida “Bank Your Vote” effort, which includes eight U.S. senators and representatives from the state.

A component of the effort to get Republican voters to “bank” their votes before Election Day in November is mail voting.

Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Post.news.