In-person early voting for the Nov. 5 general election began Monday in many parts of Florida, with officials and politicians from both major political parties holding kick-off events across the state.
Leon County Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley said the early-voting process has many advantages over waiting until Election Day for Floridians to cast their ballots.
“Get out there and vote ahead of time. I’ve heard the term on both sides of the campaigns here, that you are banking your vote. That makes sense. Get that done. You get peace of mind and frankly, you might start getting less campaign mail too, in your mailbox,” Earley said Monday.
As early voting kicked off this week, more than 1.16 million voters throughout the state have already returned mail-in ballots, according to the state Division of Elections website. About 72,000 more Democrats than Republicans have voted by mail as of Monday morning, the site showed.
Early voting begins statewide Saturday and continues through Nov. 2. Pinellas and Taylor counties will be allowed to continue early voting through Election Day, due to disruption caused by Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene.
Monday’s early-voting onset appeared unaffected by glitches and outages to numerous county supervisor of elections’ websites. Tallahassee-based vendor VR Systems, which operates the sites, said in a press release Monday that the outages did not affect voters’ ability to cast ballots and did not indicate “any malicious activity.”
The company said its customers began experiencing intermittent website outages last week and that “static web pages” have been put in place. “These web pages are at the same website address and include links to the most critical services voters in those counties rely on,” the press release said.
Similar website issues occurred during the August primary. VR Systems stated it has “engaged external experts and have implemented significant changes.”
