Democrats scramble to reach voters after Florida cancels mail-in ballot requests
Source: NBC News
Florida Democrats say they’re spending and organizing to chase down people who vote by mail after election officials across the state canceled all standing mail ballot requests this year. The mass cancellations were to comply with a 2021 election law that added new restrictions to mail-in voting. The legislation — which was celebrated by Gov. Ron DeSantis and slammed by voting rights advocates as discriminatory — cut the duration of mail-in ballot requests in half from four years to two.
It also required that existing requests for mail ballots be canceled at the end of 2022, forcing election workers to cancel millions of requests and start their lists of vote-by-mail voters from scratch. In practice, that means that voters who requested mail-in ballots in 2021 or 2022 will have to make such requests again to vote in local races and the 2024 primary and general elections. In previous years, voters would not have had to request a ballot again for four years.
Democrats in the state say the change disproportionately affects their voters, who have embraced mail-in voting more than Republicans since 2020, when then-President Donald Trump falsely claimed mail-in voting was rife with fraud. The new law is forcing campaigns to adapt; Democrats say they're organizing aggressively to educate voters about renewing their mail ballot requests, sapping resources from voter registration and other outreach efforts.
“It’s doing exactly what they intended it to do, which is suppress voters and take resources,” said Nikki Fried, chair of the state Democratic Party. “Instead of focusing our money, resources and time on other endeavors and talking to voters, we’re having to spend resources to get people back on the rolls.”
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/democrats-scramble-reach-voters-florida-cancels-mail-ballot-requests-rcna91294
= new reply since forum marked as read
@05 for him 
For Gov. ?????????????
If the Democratic Party jumps on this immediately they can turn it around in their own favor.
We already know that the Repukes won't do shit to notify their own voters. But Democrats can turn this into a "good citizenship" opportunity, and a great chance to reach out to new voters and lapsed voters.
when they first put the law in effect in 2020, they require re-registering for a mail ballot (no-excuse absentee ballot) every year although if you request for the spring primary, you have an option to check a box to automatically continue getting mail ballots for the remaining elections that year (including any special elections and the general election).
I am still just glad that we even have the option because until 2019, it wasn't even being discussed to do. Then suddenly in late 2019, the GOP state legislature passed it (because they wanted to use it as a "compromise" to get our (D) governor to also sign off on getting rid of "straight-party voting", the bane of the GOP) that was part of that bill. Now the GOP here is trying everything they can to repeal the law. 
During the pandemic, Governor Cuomo automatically sent mail-in ballots to everyone, at least for the primaries. I'm trying to remember if we got ballots for the general, too. We didn't have to request them, they just came, which was quite a relief.
and in 2019, a year before the 2020 election, they revised their law to clarify that they planned to keep those who initially requested mail-ins before the law went into effect, on the list for any future election - https://www.nj.com/politics/2019/08/murphy-signs-law-fixing-mail-in-ballot-glitch-in-time-for-the-november-election.html
But with that, since the state was now going to be mailing them to every voter (although the option to vote "in person" was still available as part of their "hybrid model" ), the GOP heads exploded, and lawsuits ensued, and the courts threw the suits out.
I think FL and some others "missed the memo" because this year, literally a month ago, there has been a change in the GOP policy position to finally embrace mail votes because they realized that in the zeal to spite Democrats, they have put their own rural voters at risk.
June 7, 2023, 4:06 PM EDT
By Allan Smith
The Republican National Committee on Wednesday announced a new program to "maximize" pre-Election Day voting among Republicans following a yearslong effort by former President Donald Trump and allies to cast doubt on the early voting system. Dubbed "Bank Your Vote," the RNC-led program aims to encourage Republican voters on how to lock in their votes as early as possible "through in-person early voting, absentee voting, and ballot harvesting where legal," a party press release said.
The program will be carried out in conjunction with the National Republican Senatorial Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee. After an underwhelming midterm election cycle, party leaders ramped up calls to make a stronger effort at getting Republicans to cast early votes, citing a significant disadvantage the party faced in key swing states where Democrats took full advantage of various voting methods.
Trump and aligned candidates, however, continued a crusade to cast doubt over the legitimacy of early and mail-in balloting, limiting how many Republicans felt comfortable casting such votes. “We’ve got to have a change of culture among Republican voters," Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, chairman of the NRCC, said on a conference call with reporters on Wednesday. "And it’s going to require us all on the same page."
(snip)
Asked about the push from Trump and allies to delegitimize early voting in recent cycles, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said such efforts were harmful, but she believes they're in the rearview mirror. The party's presidential field, including Trump, is now talking up the importance of early voting, she added. "It’s simple math: You want to get as many votes in before Election Day," she said. "But that certainly is a challenge if you have people in your ecosystem saying don’t vote early or don’t vote by mail. And those cross messages do have an impact. I don’t think you’re seeing that heading into 2024. I think you’re seeing all of us singing from the same song." "We’re going to need all of all of us saying this to help voters feel comfortable voting early," she added.
(snip)
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/gop-unveils-program-get-republicans-voting-early-change-culture-rcna88162
Too late!
I would imagine that preventing rural voters from voting would backfire big time. Back during the 2016 election, I saw no TFG signs in my neck-of-the-woods. But a woman I know who lives up north in a log cabin by a stream on a dirt road invited some of us over one Saturday. So of course I got lost and was afraid to ask for directions since there were TFG signs in every yard. 
They realized the "psychological effect" of all these Democrats who have "already voted" (early voting/mail voting) and there they are, (phony) "Patriotic Republicans®", trudging into a polling place, some traveling there from dozens of miles away in a truck that has a flat tire, to get to a county seat, proudly and arrogantly "casting their vote", while the votes of many Democrats have already been cast and they can just sit back and gloat as the GOP votes slowly trickle in.
The original intent of this type of voting came to a head after fiascos like what happened in OH back during the 2004 election when people were waiting for hours and hours in line to vote after they purged voter rolls, and then closed polling places, and the state got shamed into fixing that with allowing the early voting/no-fault mail ballots.
Believe it or not, despite all the hype, here in PA and even in Philly, most Democrats vote "in person" and only about 1/3rd use mail ballots.
Was when I was in college when my mother had absentee ballots sent to me. And when I worked the phones during my congressman's campaign, I had parents call whose kids were away at school so I learned what to tell them to have absentee ballots sent to their kids.
That's why I don't understand college kids voting at wherever their school is, where I went to school wasn't really my home and I was clueless about whether they had a mayor or what congressional district they were in. 
Of course I was pretty clueless back in those days about a lot of things. I got sent to a private girls' boarding school in Massachusetts which was not my favorite time - and as seniors those of us from New York had to get up early one day and take a bus that took us to another private school over the New York border to take the Regents Scholarship Exam - in public school we had to take Regents Exams to pass certain courses, too.
Anyway, I must have done well, since I was one of three that took that bus who got a Regents Scholarship (which in my day basically paid for books). However, they called my parents to verify what county I lived in since I put down the wrong one. I had guessed, I really didn't know. 
I dutifully requested absentee ballots every election and what was funny was that once I sent them in and they were received by the city, they were then sent to what was my polling location at home just in time for election day so they could be opened, and counted.
And when my mom would go to vote at that location, the poll workers would proudly tell her that they had received my absentee ballot! 
I liked our old absentee ballots because they were huge things that folded up in quarters I think (and you would check a box next to the name). The current ballots are smaller and obviously updated (thanks to the technology) to be computer/ballot machine-read, including using bar codes, etc.
Democrats here are trying to get the idiot GOP - at least in the state Senate since Democrats finally took over control of the state House - to amend the mail ballot law to allow "pre-canvassing" of the ballots before election day so all they have to do is feed the ballots into the machines and be on their way. But the GOP here still "haven't got the memo".
They "didn't get the memo" and went full speed ahead (although from what the OP article noted, the law had passed back in 2021 and they had already started their application purges for 2022 and 2023). Of course they *could* reverse course if they wanted (via legislation) but they are too brainwashed to move that juggernaut around.
The main reason they keep prevailing while smashing our voters, is that our voters still aren't turning out as much as they could. They are not living, breathing, or eating "politics" and are just trying to work, get a roof over their heads, and put food on the table and unfortunately, "voting" seems ancillary to doing that (and in many cases, is made too inconvenient for them to do so with their schedules).
The bellweather turnout for Democrats should be what was seen for 2008 (which happened after the 2006 Democratic takeover of the House for the first time since 1994).
(crossing fingers)
