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Voters in Orange County and across Florida may hit a bump in the road when requesting their vote-by-mail ballots, stemming from 2022 state legislation intended to improve the security of driver’s licenses and state ID cards.
The law requires that driver’s licenses and ID cards now include at least four randomly generated numbers when they are renewed or replaced. The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, which began implementing the legislation on July 31, 2024, stated that its goal is better privacy protection for individuals.
However, the department doesn’t automatically provide that new information to Florida’s 67 supervisors of elections, resulting in a mismatch between a resident’s new driver’s license or ID and the information on their voter registration.
That could pose a problem if residents request a vote-by-mail ballot or even sign a ballot measure petition, said Brad Ashwell, state director for All Voting is Local in Florida, a nonpartisan voting rights organization.
“It could trip voters up. It could just be another roadblock they run into unexpectedly if they don’t know the change in this driver’s license number,” he said in a recent phone interview. He said there isn’t a problem for those who vote in person.
Ashwell said that the legislation was “well-intentioned,” and there aren’t really any politics at play. He added that there is a “simple fix”: when motorists update their driver’s license or ID, check the box, indicating “yes,” to update their voter information.
In Orange County, the issue isn’t a problem, yet, said Blake Summerlin, spokesperson for the Supervisor of Elections. While some voters have experienced issues when trying to renew their vote-by-mail requests, the office has “been able to navigate those circumstances when alerted,” he said.
“While the potential for this issue to become widespread exists, it is only affecting a select number of voters currently,” he wrote in an email. “We are still working towards a long-term solution in Orange County. We are encouraging anyone who thinks they may be impacted to interact with our office in any way they deem convenient to ensure their information on file is up to date.”
Ashwell also said it’s unclear how many voters could be affected, but estimated it could be “thousands” statewide. The mismatch could become a bigger problem as elections near and more voters request mail-in ballots, he said.
Summerlin said that voters could update their voter registration online, call (407) 836-8683, or visit the supervisor’s office at 119 W. Kaley Street. He said voters could also complete and print out a voter registration paper form and mail or drop it off at the office or submit the application at any local library.
He added that the office doesn’t expect to spend additional money to educate residents about the issue, but “we are exploring ways to incorporate updated information into regularly occurring notices and mailings.”
Signatures on petitions, however, may be rejected if the new license number doesn’t match a signee’s voter registration information. Ashwell said that could be an issue for some ballot measures, such as Medicaid expansion, but he is not aware of any such problems.
Summerlin said that to date, “no citizen initiative ballot petitions have been rejected” because of the new requirements.
While his organization hasn’t contacted all 67 county election offices, Ashwell said several, such as Miami-Dade and Osceola counties, are being more proactive and alerting voters. He said remedying the problem is “easy to do, but people don’t know they need to do it.”
By all accounts, mail-in voting is popular in Florida and elsewhere. In 2024, more than 3 million Floridians voted by mail in the general election, or about a quarter of all votes cast in the state, according to state statistics. In Orange County, nearly 151,000 residents voted by mail.
Nationwide, voters cast 46.8 million mail ballots, comprising 30.3 percent of the turnout in the 2024 general election, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. However, President Donald Trump last week pledged to eliminate mail-in voting.
“Mail-in ballots are corrupt. Mail-in ballots, you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots, and we as the Republican Party are going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Aug. 18, according to NPR. Last week, he also posted on social media that mail-in voting and voting machines have contributed to “MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD.”
Trump has voted by mail in past elections several times despite railing against the method.
Trump has long blamed mail-in voting for his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. However, the Associated Press said it found fewer than 475 cases of potential fraud in six battleground states after the 2020 election, “far too few to tip that election to Trump.”
Still, despite Trump’s vow to end mail-in voting, experts say that states — not the federal government or the president — are primarily responsible for administering elections and presidents have “no unilateral power over voting and elections.”
Ashwell agrees. “We fundamentally disagree with his take on the constitutional authority to effectuate election laws,” he said. “The power is held by the states. We don’t think it’s about protecting elections. It’s about hijacking them.”
