By Dara Kam ©2024 The News Service of Florida
TALLAHASSEE — A controversial 2021 state law making it harder for people to vote by mail could complicate holding special elections to fill two Florida congressional seats after President-elect Donald Trump tapped Republicans Matt Gaetz and Mike Waltz to serve in his administration.
The 2021 law included requiring voters to request mail-in ballots each election cycle, rather than every four years as was previously allowed. The Republican-controlled Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis approved the change after Democrats across the country relied heavily on mail-in ballots to help President Joe Biden defeat Trump in 2020.
Trump this week set the stage for special elections in Florida after defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the Nov. 5 presidential election.
The president-elect tapped Gaetz, a firebrand Republican from Northwest Florida, to serve as attorney general. Gaetz quickly resigned from Congress on Wednesday. Trump also selected Waltz, who was first elected to Congress in 2018, to serve as national security adviser.
After last week’s elections, Republicans make up a slim majority in Congress, creating pressure to fill the vacancies in the Florida districts, which are GOP strongholds. Waltz represents Congressional District 6, which is made up of all or parts of Flagler, Lake, Marion, Putnam, St. Johns and Volusia counties. Gaetz represented Congressional District 1, which is made up of all or parts of Escambia, Okaloosa, Santa Rosa and Walton counties.
DeSantis is expected to quickly announce dates for special primary and special general elections.
But the 2021 law, which says “one request is deemed sufficient to receive a vote-by-mail ballot for all elections through the end of the calendar year of the next regularly scheduled general election,” means that voters will have to make new mail-in ballot requests for elections after Dec. 31.
The change in the length of time requests for mail-in ballots are valid has created a “conundrum” for officials preparing for the special elections, Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections Paul Lux told The News Service of Florida on Friday.
Florida law also requires supervisors of elections to send mail-in ballots to overseas voters and military voters 45 days prior to an election. In addition, a federal law requires supervisors to send a notice of upcoming elections to voters who are overseas or in the military, Lux said.
With municipal elections scheduled in March, Lux said he generally tries to send such notices out “the week before Thanksgiving,” which would be next week.
“The question is, will I have an election date to put on there for them to say, ‘Hey, by the way, there’s this election coming, and if you want to vote in it, here’s how you get a ballot.’ Because otherwise, all I have are my March municipal elections,” Lux said.
David Ramba, executive director of the Florida Supervisors of Elections association, suggested that DeSantis set the special primary elections around Feb. 15 and the special general elections around April 1, to allow local elections officials to comply with the 45-day requirement for overseas and military ballots.
The schedule for the special congressional elections — coming on the heels of the presidential election — highlights problems with the shortened time frame to request mail-in ballots, a change which the supervisors opposed in 2021.
“Our position is that current voters who have submitted valid mail-in ballots in an election should be allowed to check the box, or elect to continue to receive their ballot for the next cycle when they vote in order to ensure voters who wish to receive their ballot in this manner can continue to do so,” Ramba told the News Service. “This process of wiping out the list every two years is a huge workload for a supervisor’s office, which, in this case, is also trying to do a quick turnaround on a special election as well as re-educate voters that received a vote-by-mail ballot three months ago that they now will not receive it again unless they reapply for that service.”
Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Nikki Fried said the shortened time frame for vote-by-mail requests has “created chaos” in the electoral process. Republican lawmakers had “no credible reason” for requiring voters to request mail-in ballots every two years, she said.
“It was because they (Republicans) were losing at vote-by-mail. And now you have more voter suppression, and we have these special elections that are coming up and people aren’t going to be able to vote the way that they traditionally have,” Fried said.
Democrats are recruiting candidates to run for the congressional seats, which will “create a domino effect” by opening up other races, Fried told the News Service.
“What they (Republicans) have done is created chaos in our electoral process,” Fried said in a phone interview Friday. “It’s expensive. It’s being able to reach all these individuals in a very short period of time. But these are the unintended, or intended, consequences of their short-sightedness when they start to play around with these new laws on voters and voting.”
Lux said he mailed “way fewer” ballots to Okaloosa voters for the November election and had a higher percentage of returned ballots than he did in 2022. The changes to the mail-in ballot requests turned out to be “a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said.
“Zeroing out the requests means the only people that I’m mailing ballots to are people who are actively saying, ‘I need a ballot for this election,’” the supervisor said.
In addition to notices from elections officials, voters also will likely be nudged to request mail-in ballots by political parties or campaigns.
Supervisors in the affected counties could face other issues as well, according to Lux.
“We just used most of our ballot paper, we just used most of our ballot envelopes. So now I have to order new envelopes,” he said.
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