Supervisor of Elections: If you didn’t get mailer from me, be worried

If you’re a registered voter in Seminole County and you haven’t gotten a mailer from the Supervisor of Elections to confirm your address, you should reach out.

Every registered voter in Seminole County should have gotten a mailer in the last two weeks confirming their address. Seminole County Supervisor of Elections Amy Pennock spoke with Oviedo Community News about the mailers, which caused some residents to worry that they would be removed from the voter rolls if they didn’t respond. 

If you got the mailer, you don’t need to respond, Pennock said. If one hasn’t come through, though, that could mean it was returned as undeliverable – which would be the bigger issue. 

“My household has three registered voters, and we got all of ours on three separate days,” Pennock said. “So the post office does their best, but they don’t always get it delivered out on the same day. So I would say, you know, give it another week or so.” 

Florida law now requires supervisors of elections to do voter registration list maintenance. Supervisors can do that one of two ways: Notify voters who haven’t voted in two elections that they are being placed on an inactive list, which can eventually lead to them being removed from the voter rolls and need to register to vote again. Or election supervisors can contact all the registered voters in the county. 

Pennock chose the latter. She said the process cost $156,000 to mail cards to all 349,790 registered voters in the county. As a newly-elected Supervisor of Elections, she said she has a responsibility to make sure the voter rolls are “clean.” 

“We’re not election deniers in this office,” Pennock said. “We’re not stacking the deck. We’re not targeting any one party, any one city. This went out to 100% of registered voters in Seminole County. We chose it because it has the [least] impact on voters.”

For voters whose confirmation was returned as undeliverable, Pennock said her office will try four more times to reach out to them by mail. And if that’s unsuccessful, they would be moved to an “inactive” status, which would stop them from getting future communications. 

If you’re on the inactive list and don’t vote for two general elections, you would be removed from the rolls. That means you would have to register to vote again before casting a ballot.

Pennock said that if you get a mailer to your address for a voter who no longer lives there, the best thing to do is mark it as “return to sender” and “not at this address.”

“You don’t have to put a stamp on it,” Pennock said. “We are required to have that returned piece of mail to take action. … And that starts the research process.”

Seminole County currently has 349,790 registered voters in the county. Of those, 111,087 are registered as Democrats, 122,688 are registered as Republicans, 103,732 are registered with no political party, and 12,283 are registered with a minor party. 

See below for an edited transcript of the interview with Pennock. 

Question: Why did you guys send out the mailers? 

Pennock: So in odd years, which is a year we don’t have [general] elections, we are required to do a larger list maintenance process. And so what we decided, based on the Florida statute, was to reach out to 100% of our voters to ask them to confirm their address. As a new Supervisor of Elections, I have responsibility for clean voter rolls, and in order for me to be able to say confidently that our voter rolls are clean, this was the process that I needed to go through to give myself comfortability, that we don’t have duplicate registrations, or people that have moved out of county, out of state and and just to really get to a clean base so that we can move forward. 

Question: Why was this the least restrictive option? 

Pennock: So we have two options according to the statute, one is to do 100% outreach to all voters, or the second process is to only reach out to the voters who’ve not voted in the last two general elections and start the process of inactivating and potential removal of them from the voter rolls. And so I chose to go this other direction. It’s a much longer process. It’s about … a five year process. What we do is we either get the signed form back from the voter, or they call in or they visit the website. We don’t have to touch those records. But when we get the undeliverable return mail from the post office, we work every single one of those voter’s files, and it will probably take us about a year to work each voter, because we have four attempts to reach them before we start the inactivation process. And so, after that year or so, if we’ve not been able to identify their updated information, we could start the inactivation process. We put the voter in an active (status) and after two general elections, if they haven’t voted at that time, we would start the removal process. So that’s the five year process here, versus the other process of moving straight into inactive and then removal. 

Question: How many inactive voters are there currently in Seminole County? 

Pennock: Currently, Seminole County has 14,441 inactive voters sitting on our rolls that we are working through the process of trying to identify them, update their information and go through that process.

Question: Do you have any projections on how many more inactive voters will be added because of this?

Pennock: Honestly, I don’t. Based on the mail that we received today, we, gosh. We got four buckets of mail. Yeah, and I’m going to say the significant portion of it were address confirmations where voters were signing and returning them. We did probably get a bucket and a half of the undeliverable mail. And so I think we would have a better understanding, you know, in six months, the impact that it would have on the voters. We just did the [National Change of Address] process, which we’re required to do again in odd years. It’s the national change of address process, and it actually affected our voter rolls by just a little bit over 4,000 that were removed because they moved out of county, out of state, etc. However, we had more voters move in, so our voter number didn’t change significantly.

Question: Have you heard from voters who were worried this wasn’t legitimate mail?

Pennock: We have heard from voters on the concern of its legitimacy. We’ve heard from the media. We’ve heard from a lot of people, and actually, we’re very excited that people have taken notice and have questioned this, because it’s making us realize, obviously, that people are paying attention and they are concerned about legitimate information being out there. There is a lot of misinformation on social media. This address change confirmation request does not affect your voter registration status. If you don’t respond, you will not get put inactive; you will not be removed. This is just to make sure that we have the most up to date information on your voter record. Or if we don’t hear back from you, or we get an undeliverable mail, we start working that account to see if we can find the voter we have. 

We’ve heard a lot of concerns that it’s not a legit piece of mail, but it is. It’s required by statute that we do this outreach, and I’m excited that people have really questioned it and gotten actively engaged in the process. The voters, you know, they can always go to our website. We have a page on our website that allows you to confirm official election mail, and this is posted on there, so our voters can go there. They can validate the mail when it comes out, we encourage voters to go out to our website and validate, to give them, you know, ease of mind that this is a legitimate piece of mail. 

Question: What happens if the mail comes back as undeliverable?

Pennock: So if this card gets returned to us from the post office (as) undeliverable, we start that process of trying to identify the voter’s information, get it updated, and that’s the process where they would go into that potential inactivation within the next year or so. 

Question: What happens if you get the mailer, but never send it back?

Pennock:  Nothing, nothing’s going to happen to your record. My only concern with that is, if your information is incorrect, it obviously got to you, but if your information is incorrect, do you need to update it? It could delay your time at the polls, if you show up to vote and you’re at the wrong precinct. We actually had a staff member who’s lived at her address for 10 years. She has two voters in her house, and she received three postcards. One of the postcards (was) of someone that previously lived at that address. And so this, that’s a perfect example of someone needing to respond to that postcard. This is not correct. This person doesn’t live at my address, and to return it to us so that we can get that voter record researched and updated.

Question: So what should you do if a mailer shows up for someone who doesn’t live at the address?

Pennock: Please reach out to our office. What I would recommend in that situation, you can either put Return to Sender, not at this address, and the post office will send it back to us. You don’t have to put a stamp on it. You can call our office. We are required to have that returned piece of mail to take action, and so the better option would be to put Return to Sender, not at this address, so that we get that piece of mail. And that starts the research process. In order for us to make any changes on a voter record, we have to have a legal document. If you called us and said, ‘my mother passed away, can you remove her from the voter rolls?’ I can’t just take your word for it. I have to have a legal document, such as her death record. … We can’t just take the word of someone calling in that doesn’t have all of the voter information necessary to validate that person’s ID. We have to have an official document that allows us to start the process to change the voter record.

Question: So what do you do when you get a returned post card?

Pennock: You probably have gotten a return letter to the house, where they put the yellow sticky on the envelope and they return to sender undeliverable. We would like to hope that the post office would capture incorrect names going to mailboxes, but it doesn’t always happen. So, you know, having a diligent voter go ahead and return that would be very, very helpful. It would be returned by the post office, and we will have an official notice like that, yellow sticky return undeliverable, address not found name. So we start researching with the programs that we have. So sometimes the post office will put the forwarding address on that little yellow sticky, and so we will reach out to the voter using that forwarding address. We have other systems, state systems that we are allowed to use, the DAVID (Driver And Vehicle Information Database) system, and sometimes we will use that to see if we can find another address that the voter may have on file. And then, you know, we kind of do some just old fashioned legwork and try and do a Google search or something to see if we can find address information on people. And we don’t necessarily reach out by phone, it would be by that mail communication, because, again, it creates that legal document that we would have in hand proving that we’ve done this outreach four times to try to identify this voter’s updated information. And then we would take action after that. 

Question: So the bigger issue would be if a voter doesn’t get one of these cards?

Pennock: My household has three registered voters, and we got all of ours on three separate days. So the post office does their best, but they don’t always get it delivered out on the same day. So I would say, you know, give it another week or so. We did have a second mailing drop on Friday that was a combination of the address confirmation requests and the vote-by-mail renewal information. So these were sent out to any voter who had previously had a vote by mail request that hasn’t renewed their vote by mail request renewal. Because two years ago, the statute changed. And so after every general election, those expire. And so what we did was we targeted those voters with a different piece of mail, and they have started hitting their mailboxes and are calling in saying, thank you so much. Please renew my vote by mail. Here’s my address. It’s correct. And so if, if you aren’t a vote-by-mail voter, I would say give it another week or two, go online, check your voter information. You can do that online. If it’s correct. You don’t need to do anything. If it’s not correct, you can change it right there online. You don’t have to call us, you don’t have to come in person, you don’t have to sign them the postcard and send it back in. Or you can call us, or you can stop in. And a lot of people are asking, why is it important for us to do that? Well, we may have an Oviedo election coming up in November, and we need to make sure that all the Oviedo residents have the correct address. They’re in the correct precinct. They get to vote the way that they want to vote, so that’s why it’s so important just to validate and make sure your information is correct. 

Question: Could this affect the Oviedo election? Could someone who doesn’t respond be put on the inactive list before November?

Pennock: No. And quite honestly, just because you go inactive doesn’t mean you can’t vote. So if you’re inactive and you show up to vote, you automatically go back into the active category. If you’re inactive and you call our office and say, ‘Hey, I just want to validate my address with you,’ it changes you back into the active status. Just means that you have had contact with us. We know that you’re now an engaged voter, and it puts you right back into the active status. But by November, we would not have the time to research and put anyone in the inactive stage. 

Question: How much did it cost to send out all these mailers?

Pennock: The initial cost of this, for the two mailers and the postage, was $156,000. And yeah, that’s costly, but it’s also the law, and I have to follow the law and do list maintenance. … This process does not change the voter’s active status at all until we’ve exhausted the four additional attempts to contact the voter. So even if we don’t hear back from you, and your information is correct, nothing happens to your record. 

Question: You mentioned misinformation when it comes to these mailers. What misinformation do you want to clear up?

Pennock: Well, the biggest one is that if you don’t respond, you will go into the inactive status. That is incorrect. If you don’t respond, you will be removed from the voter rolls. That is not correct at all. We do have an FAQ on our website. You can go out there and you can encourage the voters to go out there and look at that and get a better understanding of this. We’re not election deniers in this office. We’re not stacking the deck when it comes to one party versus another. We’re not targeting any one party, any one city, any one status, any one sector of voters. This went out to 100% of registered voters in Seminole County, and we chose this because it has the less impact on the voters versus the other other process that you could go down. 

Question: Why does this have less of an impact?

Pennock: The other process targets not 100% of voters, but it targets only those voters that haven’t voted in the last two general election cycles, and it starts right with the inactive process. So it’s a much quicker timeframe and a much bigger impact on the voters active status than the process that we chose.

Question: How should voters respond?

Pennock: There’s four ways for you to respond. You can respond to the postcard. You can call our office. You can come into our office, or you can go on the website. You know, preferably, I would go on the website and check your information. You can see everything there. You can see, you know, your registered party, your address and your precinct, and that’s where you really want to go and make sure your information is updated. If it’s not (updated), you can have a challenge voting in any upcoming election, and we really, really want to avoid that. Again, if we do have an election in Oviedo, you have the option to vote by mail. So right now is the best time to do your vote by mail request, if that’s your preferred method of voting in an election. In municipal elections, the polling locations can change just because of the nature of the small election that it is, and so really making sure that your information is up to date allows us to communicate that change with you as a voter before you show up to maybe the regular poll that you’ve been at for the last two elections, and all of a sudden it’s not there. We’ve had that in past elections, where we’ve had to make a polling change, and people showed up to vote and there was no one there to take their vote, and so we really want to avoid that.

Question: What about the stamp for returning this?

Pennock: There’s been a lot of concern about the mail not having returned postage on it. And if that is a barrier for a voter, you can always drop it in the mail, and the post office will always return that piece of mail to us. It’s official election mail. It’s identified on it as an official election piece, and the post office is required to return that to us. So even if a stamp is a barrier, you can get it to us through the mail. 

Abe Aboraya is a Report for America Corps Member

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