Florida Republicans knew that Democrats in the state who applied to vote by mail during the pandemic were new to the practice so they decided to force them to re-apply. Normally, once you apply they automatically send you a ballot for four years. Now it’s just two:
Florida Democrats say they’re spending and organizing to chase down people who vote by mail after election officials across the state canceled all standing mail ballot requests this year.
The mass cancellations were to comply with a 2021 election law that added new restrictions to mail-in voting. The legislation — which was celebrated by Gov. Ron DeSantis and slammed by voting rights advocates as discriminatory — cut the duration of mail-in ballot requests in half from four years to two. It also required that existing requests for mail ballots be canceled at the end of 2022, forcing election workers to cancel millions of requests and start their lists of vote-by-mail voters from scratch.
In practice, that means that voters who requested mail-in ballots in 2021 or 2022 will have to make such requests again to vote in local races and the 2024 primary and general elections. In previous years, voters would not have had to request a ballot again for four years.
Democrats in the state say the change disproportionately affects their voters, who have embraced mail-in voting more than Republicans since 2020, when then-President Donald Trump falsely claimed mail-in voting was rife with fraud. The new law is forcing campaigns to adapt; Democrats say they’re organizing aggressively to educate voters about renewing their mail ballot requests, sapping resources from voter registration and other outreach efforts.
“It’s doing exactly what they intended it to do, which is suppress voters and take resources,” said Nikki Fried, chair of the state Democratic Party. “Instead of focusing our money, resources and time on other endeavors and talking to voters, we’re having to spend resources to get people back on the rolls.”
Campaigns and volunteers who might have connected with voters once or twice to remind them to return their mail-in ballots may now need to connect with them three and four times to turn out a vote, Fried said.
“I’ll be very honest with you: In the Black community, it’s very top of mind,” said Shevrin Jones, a state senator who represents part of Miami-Dade County. He runs a group called Operation BlackOut, which focuses on getting Black voters to sign up for mail ballot requests. They are just one of the many groups mobilizing to get voters of color on the mail-in voting list, he said.
Election officials, too, say they’re sending out mailers and text messages and reminding voters of the change whenever they get the chance. But in the six months since the ballot requests were canceled, less than a third of voters in three large counties have taken steps to request mail ballots again.
They just want to make the Democrats have to put in tons and tons of work to get their vote out. As usual.
And they have the nerve to call the Democrats the cheaters…