Supervisor of Elections highlights security protocols in talk with South County Tiger Bay

VENICE – Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections Ron Turner told members of the South County Tiger Bay Club that the 2022 election season – which includes an Aug. 23 primary and Nov. 8 general election with both the Governor’s office and a U.S. Senate seat on the ballot – will be exceptionally busy.

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“I believe we qualified 66 candidates in our offices, that does not even include the municipal candidates because those candidates qualify with the city clerk,” Turner said, then added that later Friday the Florida Secretary of State will send a list of the federal, state and multi-county candidates who qualified for the ballot too.

Once that list is finalized, Sarasota County elections officials will next start to proof every potential ballot for August.

“We’ll be doing that throughout the weekend with 15 teams of people looking at these ballots,” Turner said. “There are a lot of different races in Sarasota County and depending on where you live in Sarasota County or what your political party affiliation is for the primary, your ballot is going to look different than mine.”

With 99 precincts in Sarasota County and ballots for Republican, Democrat, and non-party affiliated voters, Turner said there are more than 300 different ballot styles.

“We have different maps for different political jurisdictions that we keep in Sarasota County, different lines – county commission, state house, whatever,” Turner said. “If you took all those lines and laid them over the top of each other, it would look like one of those hurricane center spaghetti models.”

To make sure the election runs as smoothly as possible, Turners will supplement his 31-person staff with 350 temporary workers and is actively recruiting about 750 poll workers for August and November.

Some of those extra staff members will be manning a call center starting the week of June 27 to answer questions from the roughly 350,000 registered voters in Sarasota County.

Most of the questions from the Tiger Bay crowd centered on election security.

Turner went on to explain how that security started with ensuring that the office had a current, accurate signature for each voter – then quickly noted that it’s the registered voter’s obligation to make sure it does.

In either case, election office staff will reach out to a voter, to establish that the signature on the paperwork, such as a vote by mail ballot is theirs.

Earlier, following a question by moderator Charles Hines, Turner explained in great detail the monitoring process for vote-by-mail ballots brought into one of several secure ballot intake stations – previously known as drop-off boxes.

Turner explained that all of those stations – which are not left out overnight – are constantly monitored by two staff members, who can make sure ballots are properly deposited.

“We actually log, when we remove the ballots from those receptacles, we logged every single ballot that went into those,” Turner said. “That's not something that was required by Florida law, that’s something that was required by the Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections.”

Turner, who in May became president-elect of the Florida Association for the supervisors of elections – went on to explain other security and verification procedures to apply for a vote-by-mail ballot.

He noted that the Aug. 23 primary has some key universal primary races, including the state Senate seat for District 22, which includes all of Sarasota County and part of Manatee County, where Republican incumbent Joe Gruters will face Michael Johnson, also a Republican.

Because no Democrat filed to run, all voters registered in the district can cast a ballot.

Voters countywide can also weigh in on races for three seats on the Sarasota County School Board.

Turner also announced that the William H. Jervey Jr. Venice Public Library will become an early voting site for the November general election and reminded attendees of some key election dates.

The date to change party affiliation is July 25.

Military and overseas vote-by-mail ballots for the Aug. 23 primary will be sent out July 8; domestic vote-by-mail ballots will be sent out July 14.

For more information, visit https://www.sarasotavotes.gov.

Earle Kimel primarily covers south Sarasota County for the Herald-Tribune and can be reached at earle.kimel@heraldtribune.com. Support local journalism with a digital subscription to the Herald-Tribune.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Elections 2022: Sarasota Supervisor of Elections talks election security