JACKSONVILLE Fla. — It’s 14 days until the presidential election and we’re already seeing record-breaking voter turnout for early voting across Florida and Georgia.
But hundreds -- if not thousands of vote-by-mail ballots could be rejected because of small mistakes, such as missing or mismatched signatures.
Action News Jax reporter Alicia Tarancon looked into voter security and how to make sure your vote counts for the November election.
On Tuesday it was “opening ballot day” at the Supervisor of Elections Office in north Jacksonville.
Election crews are busy at work tabulating incoming vote-by-mail ballots they’ve received over the last couple of weeks.
“The first thing we have to do is rip the flap off of the envelope," said Mike Hogan, the Supervisor of Elections for Duval County. “It reveals the signature as well as who the voter is. There’s a barcode.”
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All that information is run through a machine and sent to a database.
Hogan said it’s how election officials can determine who has returned their ballot.
“It also takes a picture of the signature,” he said. That’s very important because then that signature is then merged with a picture of a signature that we have on file.
If the signatures don’t match or a voter forgets to put their name down, a notice will go back to that voter, which is known as the cure process.
“We send them the cure information, and it’s done electronically. They can get it right back to us and that ballot would get back in stream if they give us the right cure information,” he said.
On Tuesday, election staff at the Supervisor of Elections Office went through about 11 trays filled with vote-by-mail ballots. That’s over 70,000 ballots that are being counted for the November election.
Action News Jax also asked the Supervisor of Elections about security measures in place to protect those who are using the mail-in drop boxes during early voting.
Hogan said every ballot box has two people guarding them to ease voter’s fears.
“They’re also chained down, and then at the end of the evening, we count the ballots in the field in that early voting site and that count is put in a bag is and is transferred back here,” Hogan said.
The Duval Supervisor of Elections said if you want to make sure your ballot is counted on Election Day, you can also track it online.
Any voter who has requested a vote-by-mail ballot can track online the status of his or her ballot through a link within the Division of Elections' Voter Information Lookup or through their county Supervisor of Elections' website.