Florida’s top elections official on Wednesday rejected the idea of hand-counting all vote-by-mail ballots cast in the state — a blow to election skeptics in the Republican Party’s MAGA base who don’t trust the way votes are counted.
Hand-counting millions of mail ballots would be unwieldy and create problems, Secretary of State Cord Byrd told state Rep. Meg Weinberger, a Palm Beach County Republican who raised the issue.
Byrd said hand-counting would be less accurate than the electronic equipment Florida election supervisors use for tabulation. And, he said it would delay election results.
At the same legislative hearing at which Byrd knocked down the notion of hand-counting ballots, he suggested he was readying a proposal that would provide something the MAGA movement wants.
He didn’t offer details, and declined a lawmaker’s request to elaborate, but he suggested it could involve additional verification of citizenship and could affect driver’s licenses, which are the most commonly used form of voter identification. The vast majority of people who register to vote do so while getting their licenses, Byrd said.
The secretary of state’s comments on both issues came as he delivered a lengthy presentation to and answered questions from members of the Florida House Government Operations Subcommittee.
Byrd performed a balancing act between many in his party’s base, including some elected officials, who distrust voting systems and reassuring Florida voters that elections in the state can be trusted.
The Sunshine State was the subject of nationwide ridicule in the aftermath of the disputed George W. Bush-Al Gore presidential election in 2000. Now, Byrd said, “Everybody’s interested in knowing how Florida conducts its elections so well.”
Byrd was one of the most conservative Republicans in the Florida House of Representatives when Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed him secretary of state in 2022.
No hand count
Election skeptics frequently demand paper ballots. Attempting to allay some voters’ concerns, Byrd emphasized that “we rely on paper ballots in Florida.”
Tabulating machines are used for counting. Byrd said the devices are subjected to extensive analysis before elections supervisors can buy them and they are tested before and after each election in public meetings.
Under federal law, the paper ballots are retained for 22 months. And, he said, the paper ballots are available for recounting by hand in ultra-close races, as required by state law.
But, he told Weinberger, routine hand-counting of all mail ballots would be “very difficult.”
A ballot can run four pages, he said, containing federal, state and local races, plus proposed state constitutional amendments and local referendums. Tallying the results in each contest by hand would take far too long, he said. A recount in an individual, close race, wouldn’t nearly be so time consuming.
In addition, Byrd said, different ways of counting have been studied and “the machine counts are more accurate.”
Weinberger, who asked questions about whether mail ballots could be counted by hand in addition to machine counting, goes by the nickname “MAGA Meg” among her friends and supporters. She didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday about Byrd’s position on hand-counting.
State Rep. Daryl Campbell of Broward, the top Democrat on the Government Operations Subcommittee, also didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Palm Beach County’s Wendy Sartory Link, president of Florida Supervisors of Elections, the statewide association of elections supervisors from across the state, said hand-counting is “not realistic for the larger counties.”
Link, who said she didn’t see Byrd’s presentation, agreed with another of the secretary’s points, that hand-counting in some counties and machine-counting in others would be problematic. “Consistency across the state is key,” she said.
Citizenship
Byrd signaled he may make some potentially controversial proposals for the 2026 legislative session but didn’t offer details.
“I think some more things around the driver’s license and citizenship. I think that’s something we can anticipate to add some additional safeguards there to ensure that … only citizens can vote,” he said. “I think there’s some more things that we can do there to ensure that only citizens have that opportunity.”
Earlier in the hearing, state Rep. Jeff Holcomb, a Hernando County Republican, expressed his concern that people in the country illegally could be voting, which is against the law.
Holcomb repeated a frequent charge from Republicans, that “a goal” of former President Joe Biden’s administration “was to bring illegals into the country.” He said he was concerned, but didn’t offer evidence, that once in the U.S. people could obtain driver’s licenses in liberal states and “come to a place like Florida with that license and try and vote.”
Byrd said as part of his response that he’d propose more legislation. “I’m excited about a new proposal that you all are going to be seeing about additional safeguards. … There’s additional things that we can do and at the appropriate time look forward to talking to you about that.”
Broward County Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott walks past a viewing window at the state-of-the-art Supervisor of Elections headquarters in Fort Lauderdale. Secretary of State Cord Byrd praised the office during testimony at a Florida House committee hearing on Oct. 8, 2025. (Carline Jean/South Florida Sun Sentinel)
Other changes
New licenses: Byrd said his office would likely support a legislative fix to a problem identified by voting rights advocates and elections supervisors. Since July 31, 2024, people renewing their driver’s licenses or state ID cards have received new numbers with the aim of improving security and enhancing identity protection.
The problem is new numbers aren’t automatically transferred to the voter registration roll. Link said that means an application for a vote-by-mail ballot won’t be accepted because the system won’t be able to match the new number supplied by the voter with the previous number in the person’s voter registration record.
Audits: Byrd said that “one of the big buzzwords coming out of the 2020 election was forensic audits. Everybody wanted audits, audits, audits. I think we are in a position where we can get to a place where we can have a 100% audit of every single race from president down to mosquito control” after votes are tallied and before results are certified by canvassing boards that officially declare the winners.
Trust in voting
Byrd said Florida elections are a model for counting virtually all votes and announcing results long before many other states, which he attributed to two features of Florida law:
— County supervisors of election can begin opening and processing vote-by-mail and early voting ballots over a 40-day period before Election Day. As a result, two-thirds of ballots are tabulated (but not published) before the polls close on Election Day.
— Florida has a strict deadline of 7 p.m. on election night for people to have their mail ballots at their county’s supervisor of elections office. Postmarks don’t count and late-arriving ballots aren’t tabulated (with the exception of overseas and military ballots which get an extra 10 days for some elections.)
The deadline is disliked by left-leaning voting-right advocates, and many other states count ballots that come in well after election day.
Because of those procedures, Byrd said, about two-thirds of votes are counted by Election Day and the only thing left to count when the polls close are ballots cast that day.
Broward and Palm Beach counties opened new, state-of-the-art headquarters buildings for their supervisors of elections in 2024.
Byrd praised the offices in the big South Florida counties, describing microphones, TV screens and large glass windows as “unbelievable. They are the standard for, I think, the entire country. It is glass everywhere. You can see and watch every part of the process.
“Our elections are open and transparent. Everyone can watch every step of the way, which I think is really significant” and is something “that instills trust in voters that they can go see how we conduct our elections.”
Political writer Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.
