By John Haughey
The Center Square
October 22, 2020
More than a quarter of Florida’s 14.4 million registered voters already have cast ballots in the Nov. 3 election, the Florida Department of Elections (FDOE) reported.
The FDOE website said 3.675 million Floridians had cast ballots by Wednesday morning, including 2.95 million by mail and 720,968 in-person at early voting sites.
While Democrats have a 500,000 vote lead in mail-in ballots, Republicans eclipsed Democrats by more than 41,000 votes during the first two days of early in-person voting in Florida.
The FDOE said more than 1.7 million of Florida’s 5.3 million registered Democrats have voted, including 1.43 million by mail and 279,968 at early voting sites.
By Wednesday morning, the FDOE reported 1.2 million of Florida’s 5.17 million Republicans had cast ballots, including 900,828 by mail and 321,007 in-person at early voting sites.
More than 700,000 of the state’s 3.75 million unaffiliated voters had cast ballots by Wednesday, according to the FDOE, including 589,892 by mail and more than 111,000 at early voting sites.
Unaffiliated voters, who constitute 26% of the state’s electorate, are considered the key in determining who wins what in the Sunshine State and, with Florida’s 29 electoral votes up for grabs, who wins the presidency.
A record 366,436 state residents voted in-person Monday and another 354,532 did so Tuesday in the 55 counties that opened early voting sites. By Saturday, early voting will be open in all 67 Florida counties. Early voting concludes statewide Nov. 1.
More than half of the 5.85 million Floridians who requested mail-in ballots had returned them, the FDOE reported, with 2.95 million received by county elections supervisors. Floridians cast 2.7 million mail-in ballots during the 2016 presidential election and 2.6 million in the 2018 midterm elections.
Of the 2.9 million mail-in ballots that have not been returned, 1.2 million were mailed to Democrats and 926,700 were sent to GOP registered voters.
Floridians can request mail-in ballots until Saturday. They must be received by county elections offices by 7 p.m. Election Day to count.
According to an analysis by the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC), which sponsored 2018’s Amendment 4 restoring voting rights for up to 1.4 million felons before a September federal ruling upheld a 2019 state law requiring they pay fines and fees before being eligible, 67,392 felons have met that criteria, have registered and will vote.
In response to the analysis, Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee last week notified election officials that the state was beginning to “flag” voters for potential removal from the voter rolls if they owed money related to a felony conviction.
FRCC President and Executive Director Desmond Meade cited the irony in the state exerting effort to ferret out felons who may not qualify without providing a system, as yet, for ascertaining eligibility.
“If you’re not able to put a system together to let people know what they owe, how can we even trust that you have any kind of legitimate system to determine whether people should be taken off of the roster,” Meade wrote in a letter to Lee.