MANATEE COUNTY – With less than 10 days away from Election Day and some Manatee County residents are concerned their mail-in-ballots won’t get counted on time.
More than 29 million Americans have cast their ballots early for the 2020 Presidential Elections. Here in the hot contested state of Florida more than 2.5 million have cast theirs by mail.
But the controversial method has residents in Manatee County doubtful their votes will be tallied in time.
“I think there’s a lot of truly unwarranted fears. When you look at the nature of this particular race especially on the national level, I think there are a lot of people that are concerned and we try to alleviate those,” said Manatee County Supervisor of Elections Mike Bennett.
Bennett says everyone’s ballot is in and will be accounted for before deadline. Though they are busy they have the appropriate number of staff to get all votes counted and processed.
However a concerned viewer described their experience differently. They tell us, the day they went to drop of their ballot the ballot box at the Lakewood Ranch Town Hall was at full capacity. And through the tracking services available they noticed their vote hasn’t been picked up since dropping it off Monday.
“I can’t tell you necessarily what day I picked it up out there because it takes about three to five days in here to process before its posted online,” said Bennett. “But they can always verify that we’ve gotten their ballot, if they’re concerned just call the office and we’ll try to take care of it for them.”
According to Manatee’s Supervisor of Elections website more than 80,000 ballots have been cast. Out of those 60,000 have been mail-in-ballots. Bennett says the voting process at the several precincts across the county are safe.
He encourages voters to think ahead if they do plan to vote in person due to long wait lines at some voting locations.
“You’ve never had this huge, huge influx of immediate people wanting to vote. I think they’re scared that their votes is not going to get in on time and we expected it to all be in on time,” said Bennett
And if you’ve encountered similar problems with your mail-in-ballots in either county this close to election day. We want to hear about it, message us on Facebook or send us an email to news@snntv.com