Florida’s gotten it wrong so many times, it may finally know how to get it right.
For two decades, Florida’s election snafus have repeatedly made the state a national laughingstock — a place that can’t count votes, where elections drag on for days or weeks, and prompting conspiracy theories about extra or missing ballots.
The 2020 presidential election might be different. Florida, for once, could be a clarion of clarity on the night of Nov. 3 or the next day — and other states could get the dishonor of leaving the presidential results unknown for days, weeks or even months.
“We’re going to be the shining star on election night,” said Craig Latimer, president of the Florida state association of supervisors of elections and the elections supervisor in Hillsborough County.
Daniel Smith, a University of Florida professor and nationally recognized expert on voting — who has been critical of some of Florida’s laws and procedures adopted by county supervisors of elections, also is optimistic that the state will stand out this year — in a positive way.
“We’re in a generally better situation than some other states because we have the infrastructure in place to handle mail ballots, unlike some other states,” said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who’s extensively studied how people vote and tracks voting at the U.S. Elections Project.
“If the election is decisive enough, we should be able to call Florida on Election Night,” McDonald said.
There are, however, plenty of other “ifs” to attach to the Latimer, Smith and McDonald assessments.
Big Florida advantage
Florida’s experience with mail voting and rules for processing ballots mean the state’s results will almost certainly be known before other big battleground states.
Because of COVID-19, making millions of voters more reluctant to vote in person, mail voting is surging. In Florida, state law allows processing those mail ballots weeks before Election Day. And a coronavirus pandemic executive order signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis allows elections supervisors to start processing ballots even sooner, once the counties have conducted public tests of their voting equipment.
Pre-Election Day processing of mail ballots is essential for timely results. At an early voting center or neighborhood polling place on Election Day, ballots are scanned by the voter. When the polls close on Election Night, the results are electronically tallied.
But for mail balloting, the process is much more laborious. Once voters return their ballots, signatures must be verified to prevent voter fraud. Then envelopes are opened, the ballots are removed, they’re sorted by precinct, and they’re scanned.
Some of those tasks may seem small, but multiplied by millions of ballots, that creates thousands of hours of work. (In Broward County, equipment bought years ago means the ballots can’t be removed from the return envelopes by machine. Instead, a squad of temporary workers has been hired to perform that function.)
Processing before Election Day means the vast majority of mail ballots will be counted before the polls close at 7 p.m. on Nov. 3. If plans hold, all that’s left to count will be the ballots that come back on Election Day.
Two other battleground states, Arizona and North Carolina, also allow early work on mail ballots.
But many don’t allow mail ballot processing until Election Day — including three other battleground states, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — which means their results aren’t likely to be known for days or even weeks. “Those are going to be the ones that will be stressed,” McDonald said.
Smith said Florida’s ability to process ballots before Election Day is a “silver lining,” adding that the state’s “supervisors of elections know how to process mail ballots. And that is a fundamental difference between many of these states that, because of COVID, are moving into a new system of voting.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis also contrasted the Florida system with other states during a news conference this week.
“There’s some of these states they’re not allowed to even start that until the polls close. Well that’s going to take forever to be able to count them. If we had to wait, man, we’d have millions of ballots that would just be sitting there,” DeSantis said.
Except for ballots “that come in at the very end,” mail ballots should be counted by the time the polls close, DeSantis said. “That will make it much smoother.”
Steve Schale, who led Barack Obama’s successful 2008 and 2012 campaigns in Florida, and this year is executive director of Unite the Country, a pro-Joe Biden super PAC, expects the Florida results quickly on Election Night.
Controversial and important
Florida has a strict deadline for mail ballots, which also means earlier results in Florida than in some other states.
Ballots must be back at the supervisor of elections office by 7 p.m. on Election Day. Postmarks don’t count. (One exception is a sliver of overseas ballots, which get counted if they’re back within 10 days.)
Every election, ballots come back after the deadline and don’t get counted, which is one reason why elections officials and political activists have urged people not to delay returning them. Many activists don’t like the rule, arguing it disenfranchises people whose ballots don’t arrive back by the deadline. But they’ve failed to get the Legislature or courts to extend the deadline.
Right or wrong, the strict deadline means that ballots arriving after the deadline won’t delay the results.
If it’s close
There’s a central reason the election in Florida could drag on and on and on: if it’s close.
In the 2018 midterm elections, the winners were decided by 0.4% of the vote in the governor’s race, 0.2% in the U.S. Senate race, and 0.08% in the agriculture commissioner contest. In the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump won with 1.2% more of the vote in Florida than Hillary Clinton.
In his latest analysis of the Florida political landscape, Schale noted that since 1992, more than 51 million votes have been cast in Florida for president. “Less than 20,000 separate Republicans and Democrats,” he wrote.
If the race in Florida is close, it’s 100% certain there will be protests and litigation and uncertainty about the results.
It will take time to count the final mail ballots that come in on Election Day; people whose mail ballots were flagged for missing or mismatched signatures have until Thursday afternoon, Nov. 5, to fix the problems, further delaying results; and there will be a wait for overseas ballots.
If it’s close enough for a recount, more protests, litigation and uncertainty are guaranteed. A machine recount is triggered if a contest is decided by 0.5% or less. If that recount comes up with a result 0.25% or less, then a time-consuming hand recount that could involve thousands of workers across the state would follow.
No one has any idea if Florida will be as close as usual. Polling averages show Joe Biden from 4 to 5 percentage points ahead of Trump. But that’s happened before in Florida, and the results turn out much, much closer.
“A Florida landslide is any win over 1%. We don’t have mountains here,” Democratic strategist Kevin Cate wrote this week on Twitter, attempting to tamp down over-exuberance among Biden supporters over positive poll numbers. He pointed his followers to the agriculture commission race, decided by just 6,754 votes in 2018. “And it took us 13 days after Election Day.”
Potential flash points
Several other situations could work against timely results:
If there’s a large number of voters who haven’t signed their mail ballots or whose signatures don’t match what’s on file. Florida law requires elections offices to contact those people, and they have until 5 p.m. on the Thursday after Election Day, Nov. 5, to complete the process for signing or verifying their signatures. A high volume of those ballots on hold, combined with a close contest, could result in a delay.
Election systems could somehow be infiltrated by malicious foreign actors, preventing the publication of accurate results. Or a natural disaster, such as an early November hurricane, could mess up voting.
A massive last-minute delivery of mail ballots, either through the Postal Service or at drop boxes at Supervisor of Elections Offices, could overwhelm the systems. Or an unexpected surge of in-person turnout — it’s happened before — could result in long lines, which could keep polling places open long after their scheduled 7 p.m. closing. (Anyone in line when the polls are supposed to close gets to vote.)
Intentional efforts to gum up the system. Broward County Commissioner Steve Geller, a former Florida Senate Democratic leader who was serving in the state Legislature during the tumultuous aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, has publicly expressed concern that if there’s a concerted effort to challenge voter eligibility at polling places or for ballots that go before the elections Canvassing Board, chaos and delays could result.
Bungled advance counting of mail ballots. It happened in 2018 — in Broward County — adding to the uncertainty surrounding major statewide elections for governor, U.S. Senate and agriculture commissioner. By the time the polls closed on election night, the Broward County auditor revealed this year, 121,599 mail ballots were received and tabulated. But 49,861 of those ballots weren’t tabulated by the time workers went home the night before the election. Another 18,116 came in on Election Day, creating a backlog of mail ballots that needed tabulation when the polls closed at 7 p.m. It took days to finish, resulting in what a draft audit called an “untimely reporting of election results, and compromised voter confidence.”
Broward Supervisor of Elections Peter Antonacci, who was appointed to the job after the 2018 elections, said he will not end the work day for employees the day before the election until all ballots that have been turned in are processed.
He said he’s hired and trained extra temporary staff so ballot processing can run on two shifts, 16 hours a day if needed.
In Palm Beach County, “We will do everything it takes to make sure we’re at zero going into Tuesday,” Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link said.
Florida history
Ballot counting has been a vexing task for the Sunshine State since the 2000 presidential election was decided for George W. Bush over Al Gore by 537 votes.
In the aftermath of the 2000 election, Florida instituted multiple changes in its election system. Ever since, it’s been revising and tweaking, in the attempt to implement lessons when something goes wrong.
Mail voting and in-person early voting at regional centers were the biggest changes. Since 2002, anyone who wants a vote-by-mail ballot can get one for any reason. The system replaced the old system of absentee ballots, which required a reason such as being out of town on Election Day.
Florida voters have increasingly gravitated toward the convenience of mail voting and early voting.
The pandemic accelerated the shift, starting in March as COVID-19 exploded just before the presidential primary, and voters responded in droves, by using mail ballots. It accelerated in the August state and local primaries, with never-before-seen levels of mail voting.
And the state has seen a tsunami of interest in mail voting for the presidential election.
As of Thursday, more than 5.5 million Florida voters have requested mail ballots for the presidential election, up from 3.4 million in 2016. And they’re coming back at a rapid pace since county supervisors of elections offices sent most of them from Sept. 24-Oct. 1. As of Thursday, 21.3% of the ballots have been returned statewide.
Florida quirk
Public opinion polls, mail ballot requests, and mail ballot returns show that Democrats are taking more advantage of the mail option than Republicans. Two factors may be at work: polling shows Democrats are more concerned about coronavirus than Republicans, and are more reluctant to vote in person. And Trump has so frequently falsely claimed that mail voting is rife with fraud that some Republicans are reluctant to vote by mail.
In many states, that may mean that more Republican Election Day votes will show up and make it look as if a state is leaning toward Trump. It might not be until later when mail ballots are counted in those states, that Biden picks up support.
The opposite could happen in Florida, McDonald said. Because mail votes, and the votes cast at in-person early voting centers, are the first posted by elections supervisors, it could look like big Biden lead early on Election Night. Later, when in-person votes are added, he said it could shift more in Trump’s direction.
Anthony Man can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @browardpolitics
