Domonkos Polonyi

The November 2022 midterm elections in the United States was the first time that new vote-by-mail regulations in certain North American States were applied. One of them was Florida, where the changes entailed extensive media coverage. In this article, I analyse the most crucial amendments of the Florida election procedure by comparing them with the currently existing Hungarian system of vote-by-mail.

In Hungary, vote-by-mail is not available for the whole circle of voters. Only those can choose to vote this way who hold a Hungarian citizenship, but his/her permanent residence fall outside from Hungary. Considering that only a smaller group of Hungarian constituents is eligible for vote-by-mail, the integrity of the vote-by-mail procedure has a limited impact on the whole electoral framework. Nevertheless, isolated cases of suspicion do happen, and the mail votes always influence the distribution of one or two parliamentary mandates. The biggest scandal of alleged fraud during the 2022 parliamentary elections was connected to votes cast by mail in Transylvania, Romania.

The current situation is clearly different in the United States. Vote-by-mail has been an option more or less equivalent to voting in person almost everywhere in the country. When Covid-19 amounted to a global pandemic  in 2020, it had a double effect on the upstanding system. On the one hand, the number of people choosing vote-by-mail multiplied. On the other hand, several member States further eased on their rules of accessing this voting option. Those debating the election results often referred to these changes, vote-by-mail has therefore become involved in the ongoing tensions in the political arena.

It is one of the effects of these tensions that certain member States started to reconsider the framework of vote-by-mail to establish stricter regulatory surroundings. The Governor of Florida emerged as one of the leading representatives of this argumentation, therefore, Florida legislation is an essential point of reference from this regard. Four different changes of the vote-by-mail procedure should be enumerated in Florida, which were included in the election reform bill adopted in May 2021. I put the changes in context by assessing them compared to the Hungarian rules. In brackets, I cite the provisions of the Florida Statutes and the Hungarian Act on Election Procedure.

First, the period, for which a vote-by-mail request is valid, was shortened [101.62(1)(a)]. Owing to the amendment, voters can only request vote-by-mail ballots until the next general election. The request expires at the end of the election’s year. The Hungarian rules are more permissive. The request, which in the Hungarian system is a unique form of voter registration, lasts for 10 years, which might include two or three general elections [97. § (1) b)]. It must be noted that even the previous Florida regulation was stricter than the Hungarian solution.

Second, voters must provide more personal data when they submit their request for postal voting. The new version of the statutes lists certain identification numbers, and the request must contain one of them [101.62(1)(b)]. This brings the Florida system closer to the Hungarian one. In the Hungarian model, such techniques of voter identification have been obligatory since the introduction of vote-by-mail [92. § (1) d)].

Third, the rules relevant to secure ballot intake stations (renamed from drop boxes in a 2022 amendment) have also become more careful. These stations allow voters, who received their ballots by mail, to return them in person. After 2021, it is no longer permitted to leave intake stations without on-site surveillance under any circumstances. This aim is reached by narrowing the timeframe when the ballots can be collected [101.69(2)(a)]. The concept of intake stations does not exist in Hungarian law, but the return of mailed ballots to embassies is similar to it [279. § (1) ba)]. Embassies have gathered ballots only during working hours. It can therefore be said that despite the differences, the logistics of the two drop-off systems became more alike.  

Fourth, it is no longer permitted in Florida to have more than two ballots in one’s possession on top of their own, except if the ballots belong to their immediate family members [104.0616(2)]. This is an attempt to restrict organized ballot delivery. In contrast, the Hungarian regulation is not hostile towards such practices. The permission of delivering someone else’s ballot to the embassies is not limited in any way [279. § (1) bb)]. Indeed, there are often news of organizations of the Hungarian cross-border minorities being engaged in collecting the ballots. In this regard, Florida opted for more constraints than Hungary.

On more general terms, this example shows how the American and the European way of thinking, regarding election procedures, converges. Some member States of the US adopt additional safeguards, which can be interpreted as a Europeanization of the American election procedure law. It remains to be seen whether this will be followed by Americanization in European countries. The political parties of the Visegrád countries are still rather resistant to postal voting for all citizens. Such a system has been implemented only in Poland, but within very controversial circumstances, and repealed quickly. One may argue, that the introduction of postal voting in the region would make the electoral frameworks of the four countries more flexible since alternative voting methods would be more easily accessible for everyone.

January 2023

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The views expressed above belong to the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Centre for Social Sciences.