Elections offices start sending ballots amid rise in vote-by-mail for Florida primary

Elections offices across Florida mailed out hundreds of thousand of ballots Thursday, kicking off a five-week run to an Aug. 18 primary that is expected to be dominated by mail-in voting amid the coronavirus pandemic.

With the first votes of the election already trickling in from overseas, the Broward County Supervisor of Elections sent close to a quarter-million ballots to domestic addresses through the U.S. Postal Service. In Hillsborough County, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, another 290,000 ballots were sent in the mail. Miami-Dade’s elections office plans to send approximately 334,000 mail ballots on July 16, the last day for supervisors to send out their initial batches.

The numbers all reflect increases from the primary election in 2018, a trend that elections supervisors attribute to the spiking coronavirus outbreak and fears that in-person voting could lead to the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19. In Broward — where there are races for sheriff, state attorney and state Senate on the ballot — Supervisor Peter Antonacci recently sent registration forms in the mail to voters who had not signed up for a mail ballot.

“They’ve been coming in so fast and furiously from our million mailer that we have about another between 50,000 and 60,000 [mail ballots] that’ll go out next week,” said elections-office spokesman Steve Vancore. “But after that we’ll do small batches daily.”

The Broward County Supervisor of Elections hired eight additional full-time staff members to keep pace with the unprecedented number of requests, said Vancore. After the next batch of mail ballots are sent out to Broward voters next week, Vancore expects the number of ballot requests to level off, though political organizations are expected to continue signing up people for mail ballots for the primary and general elections through late October.

For voters, the rise in mail voting means an early start for choosing their candidates. For candidates and campaigns, the distribution of mail ballots comes with a difficult decision on how to chase votes during a pandemic.

In Miami-Dade, there are races for Miami-Dade mayor, state attorney, county commission and legislative primaries.

One race, a competitive Democratic primary for term-limited Democratic Sen. Oscar Braynon’s District 35 seat, stretches across Miami-Dade and Broward counties. Six Democrats — Daphne Campbell, Wilbur Harbin, Erhabor Ighodaro, Shevrin Jones, Cynthia Stafford and Barbara Watson — are vying for Braynon’s seat in a primary race that will be open to all voters in the majority-Black district regardless of party.

Watson, a former member of the Florida House of Representatives from District 109, said the pandemic has forced her campaign to adjust as it prepares to hustle for votes. She has canceled events planned in churches and turned most in-person appearances virtual. Watson said she and her staff will still knock on doors, but will don masks stitched with Watson’s name as they ask for votes.

“We have not changed our strategy, or the way in which most people operate under a campaign,” Watson said. “We’re simply just trying to do it safely and [with] more distancing.”

This story was originally published July 9, 2020 at 5:21 PM.