As GOP looks to restrict Florida mail ballots, advocates unveil report that process worked

People of color, young people and new voters are more likely than their white counterparts to have their vote-by-mail ballots flagged for a signature discrepancy, but also more likely to get them cured, a report released Tuesday shows.

"This is because the cure process worked," said Daniel Smith, the University of Florida political science professor who conducted the report for the Florida Chapter of All Voting is Local, a nonprofit voting rights advocacy group.

A record 14.4 million voters turned out for the Nov. 3 general election during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with 44% or 4.6 million of Floridians voting by mail by election day.

And while Florida received praise from all corners for its nearly flawless performance on election night, which included getting mail-in ballots counted before nearly any other state, lawmakers are looking to make it harder to get a mail ballot and harder to get those ballots submitted.

A committee substitute for Lady Lake Republican Sen. Dennis Baxley's SB90, which would require people to renew their requests to vote by mail from every four years to every election year, would also eliminate the wildly popular drop boxes used to submit those ballots.

The committee substitute also would require a driver's license, state identification card or Social Security number to register to vote by mail and increase scrutiny on voter signatures on the request form and the return envelope for a ballot. 

And it would prevent anyone other than an immediate family member from delivering a ballot, making it a first degree misdemeanor to collect ballots on behalf of anyone other than an immediate family member — a measure aimed at discouraging "ballot harvesting."

It also would require anyone already registered to get a mail-in ballot before the July 1, 2021, effective date of the bill becoming law would have to register all over again.

Eliminating drop boxes and putting an end to "ballot harvesting" were goals high on Gov. Ron DeSantis's elections agenda. 

“We want everyone to vote, but we don’t want anyone to cheat,” he said back in February.

Other legislation would restrict public access to records that make reports like Smith's possible, said Brad Ashwell, President of All Voting is Local Florida. One of those bills, SB 1492, by Sen. Doug Broxson, R-Pensacola, was voted favorably 8-1 this morning by the Ethics and Elections Committee.

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"The priorities of the governor and the legislative leadership show they are not heading in the right direction," Ashwell said. "Rather than seeking to improve access to voting, they are hell bent on addressing non-issues fueled by misinformation fed to their base."

If Trump lost Florida, reforms would be tougher

Election reforms this session would be much more draconian if Donald Trump had lost Florida, Smith said.

"With Trump's victory in Florida, Republicans don't really have a lot to go on," Smith said. 

Ashwell said the drop boxes were a huge success, saved supervisors of elections across the state time and resources and would be invaluable in future elections as it is unlikely that the popularity of voting by mail will drop after the pandemic ends.

Other recommendations in the report include:

• Greater simplicity with the instructions accompanying vote-by-mail (VBM) ballots; more uniformity in the design of return VBM envelopes; and standard practices to allow voters to cure mail ballots flagged with a problem;
• Require supervisors of elections to use their website to inform voters on the status of their absentee ballot;
• Implement statewide training for supervisors of elections and canvassing boards to ensure uniformity in determining the validity of mail ballot return envelopes and cure affidavits;
• Extend the deadline for voters to resolve issues with their mail ballots to 5 p.m. on the tenth day after Election Day. 
• Allow ballots to be accepted based on the postmark of the day of the election or earlier, and not received by the day of the election.

Of the nearly 5 million mail-in ballots submitted, only 47,000 were flagged for rejection, Smith's report said. But only 12,000 were not cured, or .28% of all ballots. That's a huge improvement over the 1.2% of rejected ballots in 2018, Smith said.

There were still disparities, he said. Younger voters were three times more likely than seniors to have their ballots flagged. Also, those who registered right before the election deadline were twice as likely to have their ballots flagged, he said.

But Blacks and Hispanics, who had a high flag rate, also had a high cure rate, 75% for Blacks and 72.5% for Hispanics.

Only .8% of ballots of white voters were flagged, and 72.5% cured.

The report also highlights an alarming lack of consistency across all 67 counties in the standards used to determine if a signature is valid and in the way those supervisors of elections notified voters their ballots were flagged, Smith said. 

And there was a wide swing in the cure rates of VBM ballots across counties, particularly among age groups and racial and ethnic groups, Smith said. Pinellas County saw less than .5% of its mail-in ballots flagged, while Collier County had close to 2 percent. On the other hand, Collier also had one of the highest cure rates at over 80%, Smith said.

There was also a lot of variation with respect to notification, he said. Some counties notified voters immediately once they saw the discrepancy, while others waited. 

"You're not going to tell me that older voters get better at filing their ballots when they cross the Sunshine Skyway going from Manatee County into Pinellas County," he said.

See the full report here.

Jeffrey Schweers is a capital bureau reporter for USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida. Contact Schweers at jschweers@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @jeffschweers.

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