A recent change in state law has led to a drastic drop in the number of Miami-Dade voters requesting mail-in ballots, leading county officials and political organizations to scramble to try and make up the difference.

As of Tuesday, roughly 194,000 voters in Miami-Dade County had requested vote-by-mail ballots, Supervisor of Elections Christina White told the Miami Herald. Compare that to 2022, when nearly 440,000 voters were registered to receive mail ballots.

While White’s office is trying to remind voters interested in casting their ballots by mail to put in their requests sooner rather than later, she said the decrease has made it difficult to plan for this year’s elections, including the upcoming vote in August when prominent countywide offices — including Miami-Dade mayor — will be up for grabs.

“In the past, I had a pretty good sense of how many people had a request on file, so I could plan accordingly,” White said. “Right now, I don’t have a good sense yet of how many people are actually going to be voting by mail.”

The drop-off in mail ballot requests could complicate or change strategies for campaigns and candidates, who target mail-in voters with advertisements and pitches. It also makes it difficult for election officials to estimate overall voter turnout. White said that it’s unclear whether voters are aware that they need to request a mail ballot, or if more people are simply opting to vote in person – either early or on Election Day.

“What we don’t know is have people changed their minds? White said. “Are they deciding to now go in person, or are they just unaware that they need to register?”

Though they have been maligned across the country, mail-in ballots have helped cut down on lines at early voting centers and Election Day precincts in Miami-Dade and Florida, raising the question about whether a drop in voting by mail might lead to longer lines to vote in-person. But White said she’s confident that her office will be able to head-off the kind of nightmare scenario that occurred in 2012, when Miami-Dade’s general elections were hampered by hours-long wait times at voting sites, a last-minute surge in absentee ballots and technological troubles that delayed the final vote count.

She noted that things are different now: the early-voting period is longer now than it was then, voter check-in is done electronically rather than manually and there are more early-voting sites.

“There were variables then that don’t exist anymore,” White said. “We look at history, we look at voter behavior, we infuse a lot of math into this, so we’ll be ready for the turnout.”

‘A solution looking for a problem’

The sudden drop-off in mail ballot requests stems from a measure signed into law more than three years ago that requires Florida voters to re-register to receive mail ballots for each election cycle and canceled existing requests after the 2022 elections.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican state lawmakers billed the law as an effort to safeguard elections from potential voter fraud after former President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated complaints that the 2020 election was marred by fraud and malfeasance, especially when it came to early and mail-in voting.

That year, as the pandemic led political parties to aggressively push mail voting, some 665,000 Miami-Dade voters requested a mail ballot. In total, more than 4.8 million Floridians voted by mail in 2020.

The measure — SB 90 — was roundly criticized by some Florida elections officials and voting rights groups as unnecessarily onerous for voters and rooted in the false notion that elections are riddled with insecurities. White on Tuesday called the law “a solution looking for a problem.”

Ibis Valdes, the president of the League of Women Voters of Miami-Dade County, said that even now, many voters aren’t aware that their mail ballot requests are no longer on file.

“Life is hard,” she said. “When you’re at the kitchen table, organizing your utility bills, your mortgage – there are so many things that having to re-register to vote by mail is just another nuisance for really no reason that is rooted in fact.”

Valdes said her organization is already reaching out to voters to remind them to request their ballots if they plan on voting by mail. White said that her office has been doing the same for well over a year by sending mailers to voters and, in some cases, reaching out by phone and email.

Candidates and parties could also play a role in encouraging people to vote by mail, White said. Even Trump – who railed against early, absentee and mail voting for years as a threat to election integrity – has begun to encourage his supporters to vote by any means necessary.

“ABSENTEE VOTING, EARLY VOTING, AND ELECTION DAY VOTING ARE ALL GOOD OPTIONS. REPUBLICANS MUST MAKE A PLAN, REGISTER, AND VOTE!” Trump wrote on his social media site Truth Social last month.

White said she’s hopeful that the number of mail-ballot requests will start to pick up after June 14, the deadline for candidates for county offices to qualify for the August ballot, when campaigns are political parties ramp up their voter outreach.

Florida state Rep. Alex Rizo, the chairman of the Miami-Dade GOP, said that his party has already begun doing that work. He said that party members have been distributing mail-ballot request forms to voters throughout Miami-Dade County, and predicted that the number of requests on file would start ticking upward, especially as the August elections near.

“There’s confidence here in our elections department and in our secretary of state’s office to make sure we have the most secure elections in the entire country,” Rizo said.