Hillsborough County opens 27th early voting site as mail ballot requests drop

SEFFNER, Fla. - Early voting for the Florida Primary will be underway in Hillsborough County starting at 10 a.m. on Monday, August 5. The supervisor of elections office is opening the county's 27th early voting location at the Seffner-Mango Branch Library.

"Those of you that know that I spent 35 years in law enforcement know that I take the security of these elections extremely, extremely [strongly]," said Hillsborough Elections Supervisor Craig Latimer.

For two weeks, Democrats, Republicans or those with no party affiliation can choose general election candidates for county, state and federal offices. Latimer said the machines have already been examined.

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"We take a test deck. We know what the outcome will be," he said. "We run the test deck through these tabulators to ensure that they are in fact counting correctly."

There's a new focus on early voting after Republican legislators changed state law to require vote-by-mail requests to expire after every election. Standing requests were criticized by then-President Donald Trump, as Democrats succeeded during the pandemic in driving their base to vote-by-mail.

For the 2020 primary, Hillsborough processed about 340,000 vote-by-mail requests, and 336,000 in 2022. This year, only 168,000 have requested mail ballots.

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"We've already seen over 30,000 of those ballots have been returned," said Latimer.

He said that would be unfortunate, given the vote-counting system in Florida hasn't had a major issue in decades.

"This is a presidential year. There's going to be a lot of excitement out there," said Latimer. "Presidential years, we always have the highest turnout. In 2020, we had about a 77% turnout in Hillsborough County."

For information on early voting in Hillsborough County, click here. For links to your county elections supervisors’ website, click here.

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