FLORIDA, USA — Many of you might be thinking about voting by mail instead of going to the polls on Nov. 3.
If you want your ballot delivered to your mailbox, you have a month left to make that request.
The deadline for Floridians to request a vote-by-mail ballot be mailed to them for the 2020 general election is 5 p.m. on Oct. 24.
In Florida, any eligible voter can request a mail-in ballot and vote by mail without needing an "excuse" to do so.
The Elections Project is tracking mail-in voting across the country. A professor at the University of Florida, Dr. Michael McDonald, runs the page. Information is updated daily with the number of mail-in ballot requests and returns for 24 states so far.
As of September 23, 2020, voters cast a total of 368,454 ballots in the reporting states.
According to the tracker, at least 2,136 Floridians have already voted in the 2020 general election.
The page even breaks down the requests and returns by county. In Hillsborough County, 365,404 mail-in ballots have been requested so far with 56 already returned.
Pinellas County is reporting 369,497 mail-in ballot requests with 203 returned.
Sarasota County has already had 85 ballots returned. Another 2,512 have requested mail-in ballots.
Dr. McDonald said Florida always has high voter turnout because candidates spend so much time campaigning in the battleground state. So far, more than 4-million Florida voters have requested mail-in ballots for the general election. McDonald expects that number to keep going up.
According to the site's home page: "The United States Elections Project is an information source for the United States electoral system. The mission of the project is to provide timely and accurate election statistics, electoral laws, research reports, and other useful information regarding the United States electoral system. By providing this information, the project seeks to inform the people of the United States on how their electoral system works, how it may be improved, and how they can participate in it."
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