Early Voting Is Over in Florida: 5.4 Million Ballots Are Already In, and Tuesday Is All That Is Left
The last early-voting lines closed at 8 p.m. Sunday with the through-Sunday count at 5,401,055 ballots — already more than every early ballot cast in 2022 — and 550,106 mail ballots still out on Sunday morning. Orange County's remaining decision is an Election Day one: assigned precincts, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., three of them moved.
Florida's early vote is finished, and it is big. Counts compiled from state and county election offices through Sunday, November 1 put 5,401,055 ballots already cast statewide — 3,467,811 of them in person during early voting and 1,933,244 returned by mail, according to the civicAPI compilation carried by On Point Politics and Call the Map. Sunday alone added 241,518 ballots. The total already exceeds the 5.06 million early ballots cast in all of 2022 and runs 13 percent ahead of that cycle's pace.
The state's own bookkeeping tells the same story one day behind: the Division of Elections count compiled at 8:09 a.m. Sunday, covering activity through Saturday, stood at 5,159,537 ballots, up from 4,274,034 on Friday morning. By registration — which records who has voted, not how — the through-Sunday compilation counts 2,175,027 ballots from registered Republicans, 2,039,175 from registered Democrats and 1,186,853 from unaffiliated and minor-party voters. Against the same point in 2022, Democratic ballots are up 16 percent, Republican ballots 5 percent and unaffiliated ballots 25 percent. Still out on Sunday morning: 550,106 mail ballots that had been sent and not yet returned. A mail ballot counts only if it reaches the county supervisor of elections by 7 p.m. on Election Day — a postmark does not save it.
For Orange County, everything now runs through Tuesday. Early voting's any-site rule is gone: on Election Day, November 3, each voter votes at their assigned precinct polling place, with polls open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and anyone in line by 7 p.m. allowed to vote. Three precincts — 109, 726 and 729 — vote at changed locations this year, the Windermere change permanent and the other two temporary, and the Supervisor of Elections lists 407-836-2070 for polling-place help. Voters whose mail-ballot signature is flagged have until 5 p.m. on November 5 to cure it. The early electorate has spoken at a 2022-beating scale; Tuesday's electorate, in the I-4 corridor county that Florida watches first, is the rest of the story.
