A worker places a ballot back in an envelope in Florida in 2018. | Wilfredo Lee/AP Photo Trump condemns vote-by-mail, but the Florida GOP is counting on it to win

TALLAHASSEE — President Donald Trump this week condemned absentee voting as “corrupt," but mail-in ballots are a central Republican get-out-the-vote strategy in Florida, a state the president will need to win in November if he wants to return to the White House.

The Republican Party of Florida has spent tens of millions of dollars in recent election cycles to boost by-mail balloting, turning out more mail-in votes than Democrats in both 2016 and 2018 — a success it plans to repeat this year.


“We have won elections using mailed-in votes, period,” said David Johnson, former executive director of the Republican Party of Florida and a GOP consultant.

Mail-in ballots are ingrained in Florida elections, accounting for roughly a third of the 8 million votes cast in the last two cycles, and the practice promises to play an even bigger role in the age of Covid-19, which has infected nearly 16,000 people in the state.

But Trump, a Palm Beach County voter who himself mailed his vote in Florida’s March 17 presidential primary, this week condemned mail-in ballots as riddled with fraud.

“They grab thousands of mail-in ballots and they dump it,” Trump told reporters at the White House Tuesday, offering no specifics. “I’ll tell you what — and I don’t have to tell you, you can look at the statistics — there’s a lot of dishonesty going along with mail-in voting.”

Republican Party of Florida Chairman Joe Gruters, a Trump ally, said the party intends to encourage vote-by-mail returns among Republicans in November, as it does every election cycle

“Florida currently is well-positioned, with plenty of opportunities and ample time for voters who wish to [mail ballots] to do so,” he said.

In recent years, even as the Republican Party of Florida has formally encouraged voting by mail, some GOP candidates have increasingly alleged fraud, fights that have spilled over into federal court.

Trump tapped into that distrust Tuesday, directing his ire at mail-in voting as reporters pressed him on how elections will work during the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 14,000 people in the U.S.

That day, Wisconsin’s presidential primary had drawn national attention after voters stood in line at the polls for hours, not all of them adhering to social distancing guidelines.

Ion Sancho, Leon County’s elections supervisor for nearly 30 years, said Florida's system has protections against fraud.

“The same process you used, sir, is not corrupt, and it’s appalling you don’t want all legal citizens to vote in a manner that keeps everyone’s safety foremost in mind,” said Sancho, offering how he would respond directly to the president given the chance.

He pointed to safeguards adopted by Florida, including signature match requirements, ballots made unique to each voter and the ability to track those ballots.

“There are lots of protections to ensure that the situation the president dreamed up, which is people in living rooms somewhere, is not happening,” Sancho said. “They would not be counted. None of them.”

During Florida’s 2018 general election, 2.6 million Floridians voted by mail. In the 2016 presidential election, when Trump won the state, the number was 2.7 million. In both cycles, Republicans cast more ballots by mail than Democrats.

“Florida Republicans have won elections from the White House to the courthouse by implementing robust vote-by-mail programs for decades,” said Johnson, the Florida GOP consultant. “Those came from the party actively committing resources” and encouraging by-mail turnout.

Florida Republicans were early boosters for vote-by-mail. After the state’s chaotic 2000 recount that sent George W. Bush to the White House, the GOP-led Legislature relaxed rules on absentee ballots. Florida became a “no-excuse” state, which meant that people could vote by mail without an excuse.

At the time, Republicans were better than Democrats at chasing absentee ballots — the process of turning mailed ballots into votes. In 2006, Republicans returned 413,723 mailed ballots, compared to Democrats’ 247,053.

“In Florida, Republicans were traditionally better at going about chasing mail ballots for electoral success while Democrats relied on creating a robust Election Day turnout,” said Kevin Sweeny, operations director for the Florida Justice Association, which represents trial lawyers.

“Republican field operatives made absentee, now vote-by-mail, a fundamental component of their campaign ecosystem and it became a key to flipping the state’s political map for Republicans,” he said.

With the coronavirus outbreak keeping people at home and campaigns all but dormant, both parties, he said, have been experimenting with digital canvassing by phone, text, and social media to encourage Floridians to sign petitions, register to vote online and join the vote-by-mail program.

“The vote-by-mail chase better be a top priority to any campaign which wants to be successful, and even more so in the age of coronavirus,” Sweeny said. "Campaigns have got to be open to constant evolution."

As the Republican Party's winning margins have narrowed in recent election cycles in Florida, more of its candidates have filed fraud-related lawsuits in federal court.

In 2018, Broward County Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes was told by a federal judge she could not open mail-in ballots in secret before the county’s canvassing board meets, as she had ahead of that year’s primary election.

The Florida Department of State that year also submitted evidence to federal prosecutors after Florida Democratic Party staffers altered documents that were supposed to be used to fix vote-by-mail ballots that had initially been rejected.

Republicans aren’t the only ones to lodge complaints against the system. In 2018, former Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson sued to overturn a state law that required signatures on absentee ballots to match those on file with local election officials. A judge sided with Nelson, but the win wasn’t enough to overcome the lead of former Gov. Rick Scott, who won the Senate race in a recount.

The lawsuit was dropped when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed election reform legislation last year that allowed voters to fix, or “cure,” signature-match rejections and mandated that signature match rejections made by local canvassing boards are subject to a “beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard.”

While there have been no widespread incidents of voter fraud in Florida, the crown jewel of vote-by-mail fraud came in 1998, during a Miami mayoral election that was so tainted a judge threw out the results.

Prosecutors ultimately charged dozens of people with participating in a scheme that included recruiting and paying homeless and poor voters to cast absentee ballots.

Gary Fineout contributed to this report.