Florida General Election Vote-By-Mail Numbers - First Look!
The Florida Division of Elections released the first statewide and county vote-by-mail files for the 2020 General Election this week. The eye-popping 726,980 vote-by-mail request lead the Florida Democrats have over Florida Republicans is significant. (This data is taken from the 11:31AM statewide file that included 66 of the 67 counties in Florida – Calhoun County did not report a file, so the numbers are not exact.)
Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Pinellas and Hillsborough counties are the top five counties to request vote-by-mail ballots, which makes sense as each Supervisor of Elections Office mailed vote-by-mail request forms in the Spring to voters who had not already requested a vote-by-mail ballot. The total requests from these five counties are 2,102,749 – about 43.26% of Florida’s total vote-by-mail requests.
The majority of the 726,980 request gap between Florida Democrats and Republicans also lies in these top 5 counties - 68.95%. NPA vote-by-mail requests lead Republicans in two of the top ten counties – a 21,337 request advantage in Broward County and a 403 request advantage in Orange County.
While analyzing the statewide vote-by-mail file, tallyED.com’s analysts identified ten domestic vote-by-mail voters in Flagler County who have been marked as ‘Voted’ on September 10, 2020. tallyED.com assumes this is a typo as Florida Statute Chapter 101 Section 62 (4b) states ‘The supervisor shall mail a vote-by-mail to each absent qualified voter, other than those listed in paragraph (a), who has requested such a ballot, between the 40th and 33rd days before the presidential preference primary election, primary election or general election.’ September 10, 2020 is the 53rd day before the general election which is outside of the Florida Statute range. tallyED.com is reaching out to the Flagler Supervisor of Elections office for clarification.
tallyED.com will be tracking all 67 counties in Florida with a focus on the top 10 counties as vote-by-mail ballots start returning at the end of September. While the Florida Democrats have a staggering lead in vote-by-mail requests, the real question is ‘which voting method did these new vote-by-mail requesters use in 2016 – vote-by-mail, early voting or Election Day?’ tallyED.com will take a closer look at these new requesters in a future post to answer this question.