Voters have until July 20 to register or switch parties and Aug. 6 to request a mail-in ballot.
The post Voting by mail in South Florida? Here are the key dates and deadlines for the Aug. 18 Primary appeared first on Florida Politics – Campaigns & Elections. Lobbying & Government..
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Vote-by-mail ballots for the Aug. 18 Primary have begun going out to voters across Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, with all three setting an Aug. 6 deadline for voters to request one.
Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Alina Garcia’s Office said it began sending out roughly 168,000 ballots Thursday, July 9, to voters who asked for them.
Garcia, a Republican former state lawmaker who won election in the Florida GOP’s 2024 sweep of the county, called voting by mail “one of three convenient ways our voters can cast their votes, along with early voting and voting on Election Day.”
Broward County’s mailing window for domestic voters is about the same, with Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott’s Office initially sending mail-in ballots to voters Thursday.
Meanwhile, in Palm Beach, Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link’s Office sent out its first batch of domestic mail-in ballots on Friday, July 10.
The latest vote-by-mail request acceptable is at 5 p.m. on Aug. 6, 12 days before the election, across South Florida.
Miami-Dade voters can click here to request ballots. Broward and Palm Beach voters, respectively, can click here and here.
All three Supervisors of Elections are urging voters to check whether their vote-by-mail request is still active.
Under Florida law, standing vote-by-mail requests expire after each regularly scheduled General Election, meaning any request made before the 2024 General Election lapsed on Jan. 1, 2025. Consequently, voters who haven’t renewed since then must submit a new request to receive a ballot for this year’s Primary.
Voters wanting a ballot sent to an address different from the one their respective Supervisor of elections has on file must submit a signed vote-by-mail ballot request form, since the U.S. Post Office will not forward ballots to new addresses.
Completed ballots must be received — not just postmarked — by Election Day at each county’s main Elections Office.
Ballots can also be delivered in-person to all three Supervisor of Elections Offices. But the timing varies; for Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, voters can hand-deliver their ballots until 5 p.m. on Aug. 18, both Offices told Florida Politics, while Broward voters have until 7 p.m. to do so, staff there said.
All three offices are encouraging voters to return ballots well before the deadline in case a signature issue arises that requires curing, a process that lets a voter fix a missing or mismatched signature on their ballot envelope by submitting a signed affidavit and a copy of their ID to the Supervisor of Elections Office by 5 p.m. on the second day after the election.
The last day to register to vote or change party affiliation ahead of the closed Primary is July 20 in all three counties, a deadline that also determines which partisan races appear on a voter’s ballot.
Similar guidelines are in place for the Nov. 3 General Election. Domestic vote-by-mail ballots will go out in late September, while the deadline to request mail ballots falls on Oct. 22 at 5 p.m. across Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach.
The voter registration deadline for the General Election is Oct. 5.
The post Voting by mail in South Florida? Here are the key dates and deadlines for the Aug. 18 Primary appeared first on Florida Politics – Campaigns & Elections. Lobbying & Government..
