Broward County's top elections official is telling voters not to trust the mail with their ballots this cycle. Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott says his office has fielded dozens of reports of completed ballots sitting in transit far longer than they should, and he wants residents to vote early in person or hand-deliver their ballots instead of dropping them in a mailbox.
Scott is urging voters to consider delivering their ballots in person or taking advantage of early voting locations, according to WLRN. A normal mail ballot round trip should take about two days, but Scott says some ballots mailed within the county have taken far longer than that to reach his office. “It's taken up to two weeks for that ballot to get here,” he said, per the station's report. The delays, he said, are hitting both ends of the process — ballots going out to voters and completed ballots coming back in.
The timing could hardly be worse. Florida law requires mail ballots to be received by the Supervisor of Elections Office no later than 7 p.m. on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 3, according to a notice from the Broward County Supervisor of Elections. Voters who have not yet mailed a ballot are effectively out of time to trust the postal system, and the same notice confirms ballots can instead be dropped at secure intake stations inside Supervisor of Elections offices or at designated early-voting sites during the early-voting period.
Conflicting Signals From the Postal Service
Not everyone agrees there's a problem. USPS local management has told officials it is seeing nothing unusual. “We are currently experiencing no delays in our processing or delivery facilities for Broward and Monroe counties,” the agency said, as reported by the Miami Herald. That leaves a stark gap between what voters and the elections office are describing and what the Postal Service's own regional managers are reporting.
The clearest flashpoint has been Hallandale Beach, a city in southern Broward with more than 25,000 eligible voters. Scott told the Sun Sentinel that many of that city's mail ballots, sent out Sept. 24, were not received by voters for nine to 11 days. He became concerned about how the Postal Service was handling Broward's mail ballots late in September, around the time the county sent out the bulk of requested ballots. The issue, according to the New York Times, appeared concentrated enough that community leaders reported everyone except people in Hallandale Beach had received their ballots on a normal timeline.
Scott says he raised the Hallandale Beach problem directly with a Postal Service liaison, who told him the agency would look into it. Nothing more came of that conversation, Scott said. He has since described the mail system, in the New York Times' telling, as dramatically degraded and worse than it used to be. USPS did not immediately respond to the Times' request for comment.
A Personal Example and a Numbers Gap
Scott has pointed to his own family as an example of the slowdown. The elections chief said his son in Orlando waited 12 days to receive a ballot, per WLRN's account — though a separate report from Democracy Docket described that same ballot, sent from Orlando, as not arriving in Fort Lauderdale for two weeks. Voters generally have no way to track a ballot once it enters the mail, and Scott's office only notifies them after a ballot has actually been received, which can leave people uncertain for days.
Scott has estimated that for every voter who reports a delay, 50 or 100 more may be experiencing the same thing without saying anything, the Times reported. Just how many of Broward's roughly 1.1 million active voters have actually been affected remains an open question. “It's unclear how many Broward voters are affected,” the Washington Post noted. Even the ballot-return tallies diverge: the Sun Sentinel reported that as of 2 p.m. on Oct. 27, Broward had received 104,236 of 186,236 vote-by-mail ballots issued, while Democracy Docket separately put the outstanding count at 69,068 of 184,639 ballots issued. The discrepancy between those figures has not been resolved.
Not an Isolated Broward Problem
Broward is often a swing county in Florida, which raises the stakes on any disruption to how residents cast ballots. But the pattern isn't confined to South Florida. In Central Florida, Seminole County is the only county reporting similar trouble, according to ClickOrlando, with Brevard, Lake, Orange, Osceola and Volusia counties all saying they haven't seen the same issues. Seminole County Supervisor of Elections Amy Pennock said her office has had to issue more than 500 replacement ballots to voters who never got theirs, and described one ballot that took seven days to travel from her office in Sanford to a home in the same city.
By contrast, Miami-Dade elections officials told WLRN they have not encountered postal delays at all, with roughly 120,000 of 250,000 ballots sent out already returned successfully. The unevenness between neighboring counties underscores how localized the reported slowdowns appear to be, even as questions about scope remain unanswered.
A Broader Postal Shift Behind the Scenes
Some of the strain may trace back to changes in how USPS moves mail nationally. Democracy Docket reported that the agency's Regional Transportation Optimization initiative has cut collection to once a day for ZIP codes located more than 50 miles from a regional processing center, with the changes eventually expected to reach up to 70% of ZIP codes across the Lower 48. The Daily Yonder separately reported that late-ballot rejection rates have doubled or tripled in counties across five states hit by the service cuts compared with four years earlier, including in 11 predominantly rural counties in eastern Washington, where nearly 2,000 ballots arrived late in a recent primary versus about 600 in 2022.
USPS data complicates the picture further. The Miami Herald cited a USPS analysis finding that 97.7% of ballots in the 2024 general election were delivered from voters to election officials within three days, while a separate figure attributed to USPS and reported by KSBY put that 2024 figure at 99.6%. Scott, an elected Democrat, is not waiting for those numbers to be reconciled. With Election Day arriving Tuesday, his message to Broward voters remains the same: get to an early-voting site or drop your ballot off in person, because the mail may not get there in time.
