Florida voters prefer mail ballots over early voting
ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. —
By a two-to-one margin, Florida voters are choosing vote-by-mail balloting over early voting as their preferred method, with the primary in a key midterm election year coming up Tuesday.
While voters like Hernan Castellano say vote-by-mail is convenient, he chose to go to the Alafaya Branch Library and vote early.
“It was very easy. It was very safe. It was very comfortable. I think it is the way to go,” he told WESH 2 News.
Vote-by-mail is so far twice as popular as early voting across the Sunshine State, with 978,408 ballots returned as of Friday morning. Not quite half a million early votes, 488,547, had been tallied by that time. Both methods add up to roughly 1.5 million votes cast through Friday morning. That’s a turnout of just 11%.
It’s about the same in Orange County, where roughly 85,000 people had voted by Friday afternoon — 50,000 of them with mail ballots — for a turnout of slightly over 10%.
It’s important to keep in mind that if you want to make sure your mail ballot gets to your county supervisor of elections office by Tuesday, it’s probably too late to drop it in a mailbox.
Blake Summerlin of the Orange County Supervisor of Elections Office tells WESH 2 News, “I would say it is too late to trust that it will arrive here. You could take a chance, you could take that chance, but what we would recommend is to drop it off at our office or any one of our 27 early voting sites.”
That’s right. You have options. You can drop off at election headquarters or you can take your mail ballot to an early voting location, turn it in, and they’ll provide a new ballot.
However you vote, people we talked with say, just make sure that you do.
Voter Kaya McCue told us, “I feel like voting for what you want is the best thing to do. Because if you don’t, you’re not going to get what you want.”