Voting by mail in ’26? Make sure your request is valid

This story is part of the News Collaborative of Central Florida, an initiative of independent local news outlets working toward a more informed and engaged Central Florida. It was originally published by the Osceola News-Gazette.

The 2026 election is less than seven months away.

Those words may bring angst to residents and voters about getting bombarded with campaign and candidate messages in their mailbox, on their phones and during TV commercials.

The bright side outweighs all that—the opportunity to select local leaders who will oversee the planning, management and fiscal responsibility for our municipal governments and schools, along with Florida’s next governor and one of its Senators.

This year, in the August primary and November general election, many residents plan to, or intend to, vote by mail. It’s become a popular way to cast a ballot; about a third (58,000 out of 174,389) of Osceola County residents who voted in November 2024 voted that way. Check here for Seminole County’s vote-by-mail FAQ page.

It’s also become harder to do, thanks to new state legislation. For instance, if you requested a mail-in ballot for the 2024 election and assumed you’d get one in 2026, you probably have to make another request as they now expire, said Osceola County Supervisor of Elections Administrative Services Director Kari Ewalt.

“Everything that was on file expired on Jan. 1, 2025,” she said. “For so long, we had a box on the back of a mail-in ballot envelope to, ‘Check here if you want to keep voting by mail. People would sign their name, check the box, and that was it. Their request wasn’t going away, and it was fine. The law changed, and we’re not allowed to do that anymore. Our association is lobbying very hard this session to put the box back on.”

However, Ewalt said with other factors with identification numbers, those who want to vote by mail in 2026 may want to make a fresh request. The elections office uses driver’s license or Social Security numbers from when voters register, and longtime residents may have new information that the office must verify.

“If you registered to vote prior to sometime in the mid 90s, you didn’t have to provide any personal identifying numbers. If you haven’t moved, you haven’t had to update anything,” she said. “We have less than 5,000 people in our system who are like that. But they cannot make a vote by mail request unless they fill out a new voter registration application and provide us with that other information.”

Ewalt learned (the hard way) that driver’s license numbers change after she lost hers at a football game, and the replacement had a new number, as would a license that expired and was renewed. Those pieces of information must match up to be eligible for getting issued a vote-by-mail ballot.

“If you submit a request and we don’t have all the information we need, we’re going to try to reach out to you,” Ewalt said. That starts with the phone number the SOE has on file.

“We’ll also try to email you to let you know, but we don’t have those for everybody. So then sometimes it becomes a physical correspondence that we have to send you something in the mail, because this is the only way we have to get in touch with you.”

If you plan to vote by mail, the proactive course is to reach out to the Elections office. Check here to read an interview with Seminole County Supervisor of Elections Amy Pennock talking about vote-by-mail issues. Check here to read this story on the Osceola News-Gazette website.