Hundreds of mail-in ballots flagged due to signature issues in Miami-Dade

A day after Election Day, Miami-Dade election officials have flagged 1,868 mail-in ballots as invalid for either having a missing or mismatched signature, a problem that voters still have time to fix.

The vast majority of the ballots were flagged for missing a signature on the envelope, according to Miami-Dade Deputy Supervisor of Elections Suzy Trutie.

Voters have been notified about the errors on their ballots and still have time to make corrections through signature affidavits to have their votes count.

Voters have until 5 p.m. Thursday to fix or “cure” an error and submit a provisional ballot cure affidavit to the elections office.

As of Wednesday, the elections department has received 3,358 signature affidavits, 91% of which have been accepted and counted, Trutie said. That’s on top of the 1,868 ballots that are pending a “cure,” Trutie said.

In Miami Dade, 510,444 of the 1.1 million votes were cast by mail in the Nov. 3 general election, according to Florida’s Division of Elections data updated on Wednesday morning.

Mailed-in ballots differ from in-person voting in that they don’t rely on picture IDs to identify people, but rather on signatures to validate the ballot without the voter present. When a signature doesn’t match, it can be rejected.

Florida law requires that each county’s three-member canvassing board — the supervisor of elections, a county court judge who acts as the chair, and the chair of the board of county commissioners — has the final say in which ballots get counted.

The process is taking on increasing importance because a key Florida Senate race in Miami is coming down to the wire and likely heading to a recount.

Miami Democratic state Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez is trailing Republican challenger Ileana Garcia by only 21 votes in the race for Senate District 37, a seat Rodriguez won four year ago.

By 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday election officials had counted all ballots. The only ballots that remain pending are provisional ballots and vote-by-mail ballots that had been issued with signatures, Trutie said.

Trutie did not have a breakdown yet on how many of those 1,868 vote-by-mail ballots that have signature problems were cast for District 37.

The elections department had also identified 238 provisional ballots cast in the Senate race.

Provisional ballots are meant to provide backup for in-person voters if there’s a question about their eligibility when they show up to vote, such as forgetting to bring an ID or not showing up in the voter rolls. Voters have until 5 p.m. on Thursday to provide documentation or written evidence of their eligibility to vote.

This story was originally published November 4, 2020 at 5:32 PM.