First vote-by-mail ballots for 2026 Florida primaries have already been returned

Supervisors of elections throughout Florida have until Thursday to send vote-by-mail (VBM) ballots to domestic voters who have requested them in advance of the Aug. 18 primary elections.

Mail ballots have already been sent to overseas voters, and so far 477 have been returned, according to the Florida Division of Elections website.

A 2021 election law requires voters to request mail ballots at the end of each general election year. As of Monday afternoon, more than 1.1 million registered voters have requested vote-by-mail ballots in advance of the August primary and Democratic voters have made the most requests to date.

So far, 523,083 registered Democratic voters in Florida have requested vote-by-mail ballots, compared to 391,149 registered Republicans. An additional 217,849 Non-Party-Affiliated voters and 25,193 from other political parties have made such requests.

Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried said Monday that since that law went fully into effect, it’s been up to party officials to educate their voters that they need to request vote-by-mail ballots with their local supervisors of elections if that’s how they intend to vote.

“They went after one of the easiest ways for people to exercise their rights to vote, and so since then we have of course seen across the state the drop off of vote-by-mail and having to let people know that every two years you have to sign up,” she said on a Zoom conference call.

The deadline to request a vote-by-mail is Thursday, Aug. 6.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March that in part directed the U.S. Post Office to transmit mail ballots only for states that submit to the agency lists of their mail-in voters and met other requirements for their mail voting programs. A federal judge blocked that order going nationwide on July 1.

After a notable decline in requests for vote-by-mail ballots for the two special congressional elections held in January and April 2025, Florida election officials recommended to state lawmakers both before and after the 2025 legislative session that the state allow voters to check a box on the return envelopes of their mail ballots asking that their vote-by-mail ballots request remain active for the next election.

The Legislature ignored those requests, however.

The deadline to register to vote in the primary is July 20.