Lake County Supervisor of Elections Alan Hays in testimony before Senate Ethics and Elections Committee on Feb. 4, 2025. (Screenshot via the Florida Channel)
Among the voting restrictions the GOP-controlled Florida Legislature has enacted since the 2020 presidential election is a law requiring voters to renew their vote-by-mail (VBM) ballot requests every two years instead of every four years.
That 2021 law saw requests for VBM ballots plummet in the 2024 election, and it’s depressed the number of requests for VBM ballots in two congressional special elections taking place right now.
That situation prompted a group of supervisors of elections on Tuesday to recommend to state lawmakers allow voters to check a box on the return envelopes of their mail ballots requesting that their vote-by-mail ballots request remain active for the next election.
Speaking before the Senate Committee on Ethics and Elections in Tallahassee on Tuesday, Lake County Republican Supervisor of Elections Alan Hays argued change is needed by referencing what is happening right now in his county — close to 14,000 voters requested a mail ballot in the Congressional District 6 race last November, but so far in early 2025, the beginning of a new election cycle, only around 3,300 renewed their request to vote by mail for the congressional special election primary there last week, a difference of 11,000 people.
“That’s a major thing,” Hays said. “Our theory is if they had the luxury of checking a box in that general election return ballot that said, ‘Please keep my vote by mail request valid,’ then we could have continued to send them their vote by mail ballot for the special election.”
Dave Ramba, executive director of the Florida Supervisors of Elections (FSE), said a similar dearth of voters able to get a mail ballot has taken place in Florida’s 1st Congressional District, where a special primary election was held last week to choose a successor to Matt Gaetz, who stepped down shortly after he was re-elected last November.
(Donald Trump had nominated Gaetz for U.S. attorney general but Gaetz ultimately withdrew his name from consideration).
Ramba produced a pie chart showing 98,343 requests for vote-by-mail ballots in last year’s general election in that race. He compared that to just 12,392 requests for a vote-by-mail ballot in the special primary election held there last week.
“These voters three months ago were seeing vote-by-mail ballots for the November election,” said Ramba. “We’ve gotten a lot of complaints about people [asking], ‘Why didn’t I receive one in January? Three months ago, I got one for the presidential — now we’re doing a congressional special and we’re now off the list automatically.’”
Wish list
The request was among several the organization representing Florida’s 67 supervisors of elections made on Tuesday to the Senate committee — but whether Republican lawmakers will comply during the regular legislative session remains to be seen.
Other requests included:
- Require U.S. citizens recently naturalized to obtain or update driver’s license information within 30 days of naturalization.
- Allow additional flexibility for designating early voting sites when the main office or other governmental offices are not “practicable” for serving voters.
- Align base pay for all constitutional officers, including supervisors of elections, clerks of the circuit courts, and property appraisers, with the pay raises for tax collectors and superintendents of schools in last year’s legislative session.
- Exempt from public records personal information of election workers as part of “Critical Infrastructure Assets.”
That last request received some pushback from Southeast Florida Republican Sen. Erin Grall. She said that change could lead to criticism about a lack of transparency for the average citizen who might want to know who is transporting ballots from a precinct back to a supervisor of elections office, and what political party they represent.
“Are we just supposed to say ‘Oh, trust the supervisors. Trust the process and you no longer have access to any of this real information that we have had access to so far?’” Grall said, expressing what she said were likely questions from some of her constituents.
Harassment
Hays initially responded that voters need to make sure that they elect supervisors of elections in whom they trust and believe. But then he segued into discussing the harassment that election workers and volunteers have suffered from in recent years.
“Why is the name important? What’s important is that that ballot be transported and that machine be transported and that the security procedures be impenetrable to the best of our ability,” he said.
“And flip it around, look at the other side. If I have to give them the list of addresses and the names of people who are going to be working for me, sad to say, there are ugly people out there that would go out there and let the air out of their tires so they couldn’t get to work or try to do physical harm to somebody.
“Or to just intimidate people by threatening them, or just even allude, like, literally they’ve looked at election workers and they’ve photographed people as they were leaving the office and photographed the license plate off their car. All of these things are intimidating to many people … and I just think that it’s completely inappropriate, and for the sake of the security of the system we need to offer that kind of privacy to our workers.”
Petition process
After having campaigned last year against proposed constitutional amendments on abortion rights and adult use of cannabis, Gov. Ron DeSantis has made it clear over the past month that he wants the Legislature to enact tighter restrictions on the petition-gathering process required to get such amendments on the ballot — restrictions that critics warn could make it much harder for such proposals to get before the voters.
South Florida Democratic Sen. Tina Polsky asked the panel of election officials (which included Lafayette County Supervisor of Elections Travis Hart and Charlotte County Supervisor of Elections Leah Valenti) whether they believe there is a need to reform the petition process.
Ramba said the local supervisors have to do a tremendous amount of work in verifying such signatures, adding that while the public mostly focused on Amendment 3 and Amendment 4 last year, at one point 34 proposed amendment sponsors were collecting signatures, and there already are 21 in the mix for the 2026 election cycle.
“There can be some tweaks,” he said, adding that his organization has given some “suggestions” to members of the House and Senate. “We try to not engage on these items until we get an actual bill filed, until we can see something on paper.”
Hays said he believed the best process would be for an organization funding a citizen’s initiative to send such petitions to voters with a stamped envelope addressed to the local supervisor of elections.
“So, if you’re looking for a specific methodology, I would suggest you look into that particular process to require the initiative sponsors to mail the petition or somehow get the petition in the hands of the voters, let the voters then mail it back to [the supervisor of elections].”
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