Miami-Dade elections supervisor to save ballot images after years-long Democratic lawsuit

Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor Alina Garcia will start saving digital images of ballots starting in next month’s local elections — a change Florida’s Democratic Party has been fighting the office for in court for years.

Under state law, supervisors are required to save paper ballots for 22 months after an election. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit have argued that law should apply to digital images of the ballots taken by the voting machine too to add another layer of security during recounts. Their case against Miami-Dade’s elections office was set to go to trial in January.

“This is a huge victory for verifiability and for transparency,” said Joseph Geller, one of the plaintiffs and Democratic Miami-Dade County School Board member, of Garcia’s decision to start saving ballot images.

Garcia, a Republican who is the first elected supervisor in decades, says the move is not about politics — even if Democrats had been the ones pushing for the change.

“I’m here to serve the community, Republicans, Independents and Democrats, everybody the same. And it’s a legitimate issue,” she told the Miami Herald in an interview.

“The lawsuit in question was filed against the previous elections office when it operated as a county department,” she later added in a text message. “Since taking office, I have prioritized transparency and modernization.”

But, she added, she would not have made the change if the office had not acquired new voting machines earlier this year that make it easier to save and store a large number of images of ballots. She said that doing so on the old machines would have resulted in delays reporting results.

The Democrats on the case have also argued that the issue should not be partisan, but point to Broward County’s supervisor of elections misplacing more than 2,000 ballots in the recount for party chair Nikki Fried’s commissioner of agriculture race in 2018 as part of the impetus for the state party’s involvement.

“There was a lesson there: Ballot images could have produced the accurate result,” party lawyer Chris Sautter said. “The reason why the Democratic Party under Nikki Fried sees this as an important priority is, she was a witness to some of the problems that can exist when there’s a close election.”

In 2020, Democratic elected officials and the state party sued the eight largest counties in a Tallahassee state court seeking to force the state to treat ballot image retention the same way they do paper ballots.

After a judge dismissed that case, the plaintiffs’ strategy shifted to suing Miami-Dade’s elections supervisor in the local circuit court because it’s the county with the largest number of voters, Geller said.

“This supervisor didn’t make us take it into court, she said, ‘Let’s do the right thing,’” Geller said. “This is highly significant, not the first, but the largest. The biggest and the first among the eight that we tried to get, hoping everybody then follows. This is the crack in the wall.”

This story was originally published October 10, 2025 at 3:40 PM.

Claire Heddles

Miami Herald

Claire Heddles is the Miami Herald’s senior political correspondent. She previously covered national politics and Congress from Washington, D.C at NOTUS. She’s also worked as a public radio reporter covering local government and education in East Tennessee and Jacksonville, Florida.