I was crunching Florida’s early in-person voting files last night, and penned this article for electionline.org’s weekly newsletter (not online yet, but will be soon).

A few highlights:

• If we figure turnout at 50%, and given the reports coming out about absentee ballots, about 20% of Florida’s presidential primary ballots have been cast.
• Democratic turnout is running slightly above Republican turnout. Florida voters don’t seem to realize that there isn’t a race on the Democratic side!
• There is a fairly wide disparity across counties in early turnout. Lowest turnout is in Glades, Pinellas, Union, and Polk (all under 1% of registered voters), while the highest early turnout is in Sumter (9.2%–more than 20 times higher than Pinellas!), Charlotte (6.9%), Lee (5.3%) and Highlands (5.1%).

I can do these analyses because the State of Florida does a marvelous job making its early in-person voting results available.

Unfortunately, due to some provision in state law, absentee voting requests and returns are not available (only parties, candidates, and registered political action committees can get their hands on this information, and “only for political purposes”). I guess “research” just doesn’t cut it!

I presume this is because addresses are attached to the records (except that these are in the voter registration file), but one would hope that they could at least do the same thing with absentee returns that they do with early in person returns: make available the name, voterid, party, and date ballot cast.

Last point: click here to watch the always exciting vote tabulation processing in Miami-Dade.