By the time Election Day is over, all the votes may not be counted. But there may be at least one way to know whether Joe Biden will be President—if he decisively wins the state of Florida.
In Florida, election officials say there’s a good chance that they will have the overwhelming majority of ballots counted by midnight on November 3rd. And while pollsters believe that Biden can plausibly win the Presidency without winning Florida’s twenty-nine electoral votes, they are confident that President Donald Trump cannot. Jim Messina, who ran President Obama’s reëlection campaign, in 2012, told me that he has run simulations of some sixty-six thousand possible electoral outcomes, and in none of them did Trump win without capturing Florida. “It’s just the math,” he said. “If Biden can win Florida early on Election Night, it’s over.”
Many of the big swing states, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, may need several hours, or even days, to declare a winner. That’s because state laws do not allow mail-in and absentee ballots to be counted until Election Day—even as mail-in ballots are surging amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
But in Florida mail-in ballots are being counted as they arrive—meaning that, unless an unexpectedly large wave of ballots arrives by mail on Election Day, state officials will post the tally of mail-in votes shortly after the polls close, at 7 P.M. At the request of county election supervisors, Governor Ron DeSantis agreed to allow them to begin counting ballots weeks earlier than usual. The volume has already set records: more than three million mail-in ballots have been received, in addition to about two million early votes cast in person. In all likelihood, more than half of Florida’s ballots will be cast before Election Day.
In theory, the tabulation of ballots cast in person should proceed quickly. Wesley Wilcox, the supervisor of elections in Marion County, in the northern part of the state, hopes that most will be counted by late Tuesday evening. “The vast majority will be done by 9 P.M., and that will be true of most counties,” Wilcox, who is the incoming president of the state’s association of election supervisors, told me. “Usually, by 11 P.M. we are out of here—that’s my hope and prayer.”
But, in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where the tabulation of mail-in ballots won’t begin until Election Day, things may not be so simple. Ever since the pandemic began, Democratic leaders have feared that a substantial majority of Republican voters would cast ballots in person on Election Day. (In Florida, Democrats lead Republicans by a huge margin in mail-in votes, and Republicans have a sizable lead in early voting.) If Trump endorses the tally of in-person votes and dismisses the mail-in ballots as fraudulent before they are even counted, he could claim victory that night. Such an outcome could set the stage for a bitter and protracted postelection dispute.
If Trump has already lost Florida, though, those complaints are likely to carry much less weight, even with his supporters. It was precisely the desire to deliver such a decisive blow that prompted Michael Bloomberg, the businessman and former mayor of New York, to pledge a hundred million dollars to support Biden’s candidacy in Florida. “He doesn’t want there to be any doubt,” Mitchell Berger, a prominent Democratic lawyer in Fort Lauderdale, told me. So far, the Bloomberg organization is spending a large chunk of its money to pay an army of people to canvass for Biden door to door.
But the knockout scenario assumes two things: Biden wins Florida by a convincing margin, and there are no major disputes about the tally. Although Biden is ahead in most statewide polls, his lead is typically not much larger than the margin of error. And Florida has experienced balloting problems in nearly every statewide election since 2000, when George W. Bush and Al Gore finished with nearly identical totals, initiating a long and vicious fight. Florida remains deeply polarized, and statewide races have continued to be decided by razor-thin margins.
The other factor that has strained Florida elections is voter suppression, which has been a key component in the Republican Party’s quest to become the state’s dominant party. In the past decade, G.O.P. leaders have learned that lower turnouts usually help their candidates, and they have pushed laws to make it harder for people to vote. In 2019, the Republican-dominated legislature eviscerated an amendment to the state constitution that granted voting rights to most nonviolent felons who had completed their sentences. On October 14th, the office of Laurel Lee, the secretary of state, sent a letter to county election supervisors informing them that every early-voting drop box should be protected by a security guard around the clock. (County governments have placed hundreds of boxes around the state; most are emptied and locked at the end of the day’s voting.) Democratic leaders claimed that Lee, a Republican appointee, is trying to reduce the number of early-voting sites, because many counties do not have the manpower to protect them. In any case, many election supervisors appear to have ignored her missive.
Voting by mail has gone smoothly so far. Under state law, voters must place their completed ballot in a signed envelope and drop it in the mail. When the ballot is received, the signature on the envelope is compared with the voter’s signature on her registration record. If the signatures match, the envelope is opened and the ballot counted. If the signatures seem mismatched, the unopened ballot is set aside and the voter is contacted and given a chance to fix the problem. If the voter cannot be reached, the ballot is examined by the local canvassing board—made up of the county election supervisor, a judge, and a county commissioner. An adviser from each of the campaigns is also allowed to express an opinion. The ballot is thrown out only if the canvassing board decides that it is invalid. “Unless there is a good reason to reject a ballot, we don’t reject a ballot,” Mark Earley, the supervisor of elections in Leon County, which includes Tallahassee, told me.
According to Earley, more than fifty thousand early ballots have been checked in his county, and only a hundred have issues awaiting resolution. Lawyers for Trump have been more aggressive than Biden’s lawyers in challenging ballots, but they have been ineffective. When I spoke to Earley earlier this month, he told me that the Trump lawyers had contested signatures on ten ballots so far; all ten were examined and counted, he said. In Broward County, which includes Fort Lauderdale, lawyers for the Trump campaign challenged fifteen random signatures, in what they described as an effort to test the system. All fifteen were accepted.
But there are troubling signs ahead. In Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, the Republican-dominated canvassing board has been barring people from filming while it considers problematic ballots. Democratic leaders could go to the courts on such contested issues—but in Florida more than two decades of solid Republican control has made that route deeply uncertain. Berger, the Democratic lawyer in Fort Lauderdale, said that the Biden campaign will deploy hundreds of lawyers around the state to handle challenges on Election Day. “We are trying to prevent things from becoming totally insane,” he said.
The likeliest cause of insanity will be a very tight election. Trump has to win in Florida, and, if he’s within reach, the threat of chaos seems highly probable. One possibility is that all votes will not be counted. Nearly four million people in Florida have already voted by mail, but some two million more have requested ballots and not yet returned them. There is a real possibility that their ballots won’t be delivered by November 3rd, not least because of Trump’s attempt to cripple the U.S. Postal Service. In 2018, when Rick Scott ran for a U.S. Senate seat against the incumbent, Bill Nelson, some fifteen thousand ballots were not counted because they arrived after Election Day—a number larger than Scott’s margin of victory. If the vote count is close this year, fights will likely arise from every kind of ballot anomaly, including mismatched signatures and missing postmarks. In 2018, some eleven thousand ballots were rejected for such problems.
