Kelly Hayes
The Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections broke all previous election records Tuesday, mailing 363,312 domestic ballots to voters across the county.
The mail-in ballots, which were all requested, were sent to 126,052 Republicans, 153,438 Democrats and 83,822 non-affiliated or third party voters. The previous record for bulk ballot mail-outs was set in the August Primary Election, when the county sent out 321,979 ballots.
The ballots can be returned via U.S. Postal Service or they can be dropped off at the local Supervisor of Elections office or at one of 25 remote ballot drop-off sites throughout Pinellas County from Oct. 19 through Nov. 2.
As of Tuesday, Pinellas County has 702,319 registered voters including 252,879 Democrats, 247,219 Republicans and 202,221 third party or non-affiliated voters.
The county went to President Donald Trump in the 2016 General Election. Trump collected 48%, or 239,201 votes, while Hillary Clinton brought in 47%, or 233,701 votes.
The county has a little more than 50,000 more voters registered than it did in 2016, when about 502,113 people cast a ballot.
The Pinellas record is no surprise considering recent trends — more Floridians are voting by mail, likely in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
This comes despite controversy from the President condemning vote by mail.
After implying that mail-in voting is fraudulent, Trump changed his tune in early August, encouraging Floridians to cast their ballots by mail, assuring in a social media post that the state’s election system “is Safe and Secure.”
The Republican President has repeatedly linked mail-in ballots with fraud and erroneously claimed that elections officials have sent out “hundreds of millions of universal mail-in ballots” throughout the nation.
But Trump more than once has singled out Florida as an exemplar of how mail-in voting should be conducted. He doubled down on the message in a tweet.
“Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is Safe and Secure, Tried and True,” Trump wrote. this summer. “Florida’s Voting system has been cleaned up (we defeated Democrats attempts at change), so in Florida I encourage all to request a Ballot & Vote by Mail! #MAGA”
