Miami-Dade Early Voting Turnout Hovers in Single-Digits for August Primary

With the primary election in Miami-Dade County less than a week away, you may expect voter turnout to be strong, as many key positions are up for grabs including the county's first sheriff since the 1960s.

However, ballots are not flooding in as quickly as some may have hoped with early voting in full swing. 

As of 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, August 14, 143,496 out of the more than 1.4 million active eligible voters have voted — a 9.74 percent voter turnout. Of the 143,000 votes cast, 110,000 were sent via absentee ballot and 33,000 were from early voting.

Early voting, which began on August 5, ends on Sunday, August 18 with the primary election following on Tuesday, August 20.

One social media user pointed out that the registration process for receiving a mail-in ballot was a pain.

"It was a headache and I'm only 45 years old," the man wrote. "I can't imagine being in my late 60s or 70s and do it by myself."

In recent decades, overall voter turnout for the primary preceding a major election — mid-term or presidential — has been low in Florida and across the U.S. Turnout, including early, mail-in, and election day voting, was 21, 24, and 28 percent in the 2012, 2016, and 2020 primaries in the state, respectively.

"Primaries are a critical piece of American elections, and yet year after year, voter participation in primaries remains dismally low," the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, said.

Data provided to New Times from the Miami-Dade County elections department shows that the pace of early voting this year appears within the normal range of what is typically a low primary turnout in Miami-Dade. At this point in early voting in the 2020 pre-presidential election primary, 35,000 votes had been tallied from the county's early voting stations. Reaching further back, in the 2016 primary, 27,700 early votes had been counted.

Voter turnout in Miami-Dade's neighbor to the north is not much higher so far. As of 10:50 a.m. on Wednesday in Broward County, 86,968 of the 1.1 million active eligible voters have voted — a 7.8 percent turnout with less than a week left before primary election day.

More than 75,000 people submitted mail-in absentee ballots while 11,000 people participated in early voting at the polls in Broward.

According to the Broward Supervisor of Elections, around 220,000 ballots had been mailed out to voters as of August 9. Roughly 125,000 of those ballots were sent to registered Democrats whereas approximately 45,000 were for registered Republicans. The rest of the pool were No Party Affiliation (NPA) voters.

In Miami-Dade, Democratic mail-in ballots totaled more than 105,000 as compared to 75,000 Republican mail-in ballots, including those not yet returned, according to state data.