Broward County’s top elections official is telling voters not to trust the mail with their ballots this cycle. Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott says his office has fielded dozens of reports of completed ballots sitting in transit far longer than they should, and he wants residents to vote early in person or hand-deliver their ballots instead of dropping them in a mailbox.
Scott is urging voters to consider delivering their ballots in person or taking advantage of early voting locations, according to WLRN. A normal mail ballot round trip should take about two days, but Scott says some ballots mailed within the county have taken far longer than that to reach his office. “It’s taken up to two weeks for that ballot to get here,” he said, per the station’s report. The delays, he said, are hitting both ends of the process — ballots going out to voters and completed ballots coming back in.
The timing could hardly be worse. Florida law requires mail ballots to be received by the Supervisor of Elections Office no later than 7 p.m. on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 3, according to a notice from the Broward County Supervisor of Elections. Voters who have not yet mailed a ballot are effectively out of time to trust the postal system, and the same notice confirms ballots can instead be dropped at secure intake stations inside Supervisor of Elections offices or at designated early-voting sites during the early-voting period.
Conflicting Signals From the Postal Service
Not everyone agrees there’s a problem. USPS local management has told officials it is seeing nothing unusual. “We are currently experiencing no delays in our processing or delivery facilities for Broward and Monroe counties,” the agency said, as reported by the Miami Herald. That leaves a stark gap between what voters and the elections office are describing and what the Postal Service’s own regional managers are reporting…