South Florida Election Offices Prepare For Possible Record Number Of Ballots For November Election
MIAMI (CBSMiami) - Poll workers are training for the upcoming presidential election and elections offices throughout South Florida are about to get a lot busier.
"I've requested the ballot and I'm assuming I will mail it in," said voter Karen Rice. She is just one of a record number of voters requesting a vote-by-mail ballot.
There were a record number of ballots mailed out for the August primary and expect even more for the November Election.
Already Miami-Dade has had more than 492,000 requests for mail-in ballots, 21,000 of them last week alone.
Broward is not far behind at more than 465,000 ballots requested, averaging 5,000-7,000 new requests each week.
"Other elections, we've never had that many," explained Mary Hall, Chief Deputy Supervisor of Elections in Broward. "We've have gone as far as 290 some thousand, just at 300,000."
The ballots will be sent out beginning October 1st in Miami-Dade and September 25th in Broward with overseas ballots going out earlier.
"We would like for all our voters to receive that ballot, to vote it expeditiously, to get it back into us so we can go ahead and scan that ballot through and make sure for Election Day, timely results are given," Hall said.
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For those who are uncomfortable mailing their ballots, they can be dropped into designated vote-by-mail ballot boxes located at all of the early voting sites in Miami-Dade, Broward and Monroe counties. There are 33 early voting sites in Miami-Dade, 22 in Broward and 5 in Monroe.
"The ballot must arrive to us at 7 p.m. on Election Day. It must be in the hands of the supervisor of elections office," Hall said.
Charles Zelden is an elections expert at Nova Southeastern University. While President Trump has been raising concerns about fraud with mail-in ballots, Zelden says it's highly unlikely.
"The odds of there being a fraud are very very minuscule. Remember all ballots have a specific code on them that designates to you. So it's hard to fraudulently manufacture new ballots," Zelden said. "When we see fraud it's usually .00001% it's a minuscule amount, not enough to change the outcome of the election," he added.
Here are some helpful sites regarding the upcoming election:
