Next year is an even-numbered year. That means it’s an election year. And that means that Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled Legislature will once again be tempted to rewrite the state election laws, with plenty of spin about “election integrity” that always seems to make it harder for people to vote.
State officials routinely congratulate themselves for how well-run Florida elections are, and for the most part, that’s true.
“The model we have is working,” Secretary of State Cord Byrd, the state’s chief elections official, told a legislative committee in Tallahassee this week.
Steve Bousquet, South Florida Sun Sentinel columnist.
Why, then, do Republican politicians keep tinkering with the election laws? Just leave them alone.
The year 2026 is a midterm election. That means it’s not a presidential election, but just about everything else will be on the ballot.
Florida will elect a new governor, three Cabinet members and a U.S. senator, and most seats in the Legislature will be contested, along with local elections for school board members and county commissioners.
All 28 Florida seats in Congress likely will be contested, and that could provide a lot more drama, because Republicans are talking about redrawing congressional district boundaries with the goal of gaining seats at the Democrats’ expense.
As if that weren’t enough, GOP leaders say they will ask voters to decide a ballot initiative that could drastically reduce or partially eliminate local property taxes in Florida.
Such dramatic change to the tax code has the potential to drive up voter turnout, which historically is mediocre in Florida midterms (the turnout was 54% in the last midterm in 2022).
Secretary of State Cord Byrd confers with Rep. Mitch Rosenwald, D-Oakland Park, in the state Capitol.
Despite new requirements that voters request mail-in ballots every two years, voting by mail remains popular across the political spectrum in Florida. In the 2024 presidential election, more than 3 million people cast mail ballots out of a statewide voter turnout of 11 million. More Democrats than Republicans voted that way, which explains the Republican-controlled Legislature’s crackdown on the practice. (It used to be that mail-in voting was more popular with Republicans, and requests happened every four years, not every two.)
Broward and Palm Beach counties together accounted for more than 506,000 mail-in ballots, or about a sixth of the statewide vote-by-mail total.
The popularity of voting by mail is one of the reasons why Florida had a voter turnout percentage of 79% — the highest turnout percentage in any statewide election in Florida in the past 30 years, even with two killer hurricanes disrupting election preparations.
Despite the popularity of voting by mail in his home state of Florida, for years, President Trump has railed against mail ballots as corrupt, riddled with fraud and unreliable — even though he has cast mail ballots in the past as a Palm Beach County voter.
A few months ago, Trump said he would issue an executive order eliminating voting by mail in all states, but amid widespread doubts about its constitutionality, he backed away. He now says he’ll try to accomplish it through Congress, where it’s not a sure thing by any means.
Byrd likes the voting system just as it is.
“We want to make sure that Floridians trust the franchise in Florida … and they trust the result,” Byrd told legislators at a hearing on Wednesday. “Because if we lose trust in the elections, this whole experiment in democracy becomes much harder.”
Trump wasn’t listening, but he should have been.
Speaking to reporters afterward, Byrd strongly defended voting by mail as reliable and accurate, and said the kind of changes Trump is advocating would create challenges and put pressure on county election supervisors.
“When I talk to voters and supervisors, it is a popular method,” Byrd said of mail-in voting. “We try to implement as many safeguards as possible. I think we do it better than any other state on vote-by-mail.”
Voting by mail works. But Tallahassee can’t leave well enough alone.
Steve Bousquet is the Opinion Editor of the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com or (850) 567-2240 and follow him on X @stevebousquet.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2025/10/11/voting-by-mail-works-so-dont-make-it-worse-steve-bousquet/
