FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Broward Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott said Tuesday some county residents are experiencing unusually long delays by the Postal Service getting vote-by-mail ballots returned to his office — and could risk missing the deadline for their votes to count.

Scott said mail voters should check their ballot status online at his office website and consider voting in person at an early voting site or on Election Day.

“Even locally, it’s taking a couple of weeks for these ballots to move,” Scott said in a telephone interview. “If you believe your ballot is not going to make it, you should go to vote in person.”

Florida law is strict about the deadline for mail ballots. They must be at the supervisor of elections office at 7 p.m. on Election Day, Nov. 3. Ballots that aren’t received by that deadline aren’t counted.

Scott said his office has received an unusual number of complaints from people who mailed their ballots — and have discovered online that they haven’t yet been received at his office.

They’re coming from people who live locally, and outside the county. Scott described them as something more than rumor-mongering, which sometimes happens during election season. “It’s reliable people,” Scott said.

One was an assistant Broward County attorney, whose ballot was mailed in the county and took 14 days to reach his office.

Another was from his own son, whose ballot took 12 days to get to the Broward elections office from Orlando. The supervisor said his son, Bakari Scott, was on his case, inquiring more than once what was happening.

Scott said he has not been able to get answers from the Postal Service. “The way that the service works now is not the way it has worked in past years,” he said. “We just don’t know why it’s taking so long for these ballots to move a short distance.”

Debbie Fetterly, the Postal Service regional spokesperson whose territory includes South Florida, didn’t have an immediate comment Tuesday afternoon.

Scott said he has twice asked the agency’s liaison with his office to allow him to tour the center where Broward’s election mail is processed, and those requests have been rejected.

“The Postal Service is not being transparent. They will not allow me to come inside the processing facility to let me see what’s going on,” Scott said. “They need to be transparent with elected officials.”

Scott has inspected the processing center before. In early 2022, just before a special congressional election, Scott and U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz inspected it after a November 2021 special congressional primary election in which the Democratic nominee was decided by five votes — after almost 300 mail ballots arrived late and were disqualified.

After their 2022 tour, Wasserman Schultz and Scott said they were somewhat satisfied with what they saw.

Broward County mail is processed at the Royal Palm Processing and Distribution Center, which is located in Opa-locka. In 2012, as part of a nationwide cost-cutting move, the Postal Service closed the mail processing centers in Fort Lauderdale and Pembroke Pines and shifted the work sorting Broward’s mail to the Opa-locka center in Miami-Dade County.

Scott, who is in the middle of his second, four-year term as the county’s elected official in charge of running elections, isn’t normally a Postal Service critic. In past elections, he’s credited the agency with being a reliable partner.

At a Sept. 23 news conference with other South Florida supervisors of elections, Scott didn’t anticipate problems. “For our voters here locally, you should absolutely feel as assured as any voter voting any type of way that your vote by mail ballot will be received and it will be counted.”

He was less reassuring on Tuesday. “I definitely think there’s been a degraded service over time. I’ve definitely seen in the past where the ballots showed up very quickly, and it didn’t seem to be a problem,” Scott said.

Alison Novoa, public information officer and director of strategic initiatives at the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Office, said voters there haven’t reported undue delays. She said she monitors incoming complaints and is “definitely not seeing” the kind of thing Scott reported.

Juan Mendieta, spokesperson for the Miami-Dade County Supervisor of Elections Office, said via email there are “no issues to report in Miami-Dade.” He said the Postal Service hasn’t notified the county elections office of any problem and there haven’t been unusual complaints from voters. “All is good so far.”

As of 2 p.m. Tuesday, Scott’s office reported 104,236 vote-by-mail ballots had been returned to his office out of a total of 186,236 that had been issued. Lisa Lee Arneaud, public information officer at the Broward Supervisor of Elections Office, said that included 6,700 vote-by-mail ballots received Monday and 1,300 Tuesday morning.

(Scott’s office and the state Division of Elections office reported that another 143,471 Broward residents had used in-person early voting through Monday.)

Scott said another mail problem has arisen. When his office sent the first big batch of mail ballots on Sept. 24, a Thursday, most voters received them the next Saturday or Monday. Complaints started coming in and were posted on social media from Hallandale Beach residents who hadn’t received their ballots days later.

Scott said he reviewed reports of scanned mail from the Postal Service and saw that, for some still unexplained reason, many of that city’s mail ballots weren’t received by voters for nine to 11 days.

Supervisor’s advice

People can vote only once, Scott said. “If you believe your ballot is lost in the mail, if you believe the ballot is not going to make it on time, you still have a right to vote.”

Safeguards are in place to prevent double voting. If someone goes to vote in person and their mail ballot has, in fact, been received at his office, the internal system will show they’ve voted and they won’t be allowed to vote again.

Conversely, Scott said, if someone has voted in person and a mail ballot arrives later, that ballot will be flagged and not counted. “If it shows up a minute later, it will get rejected. You cannot vote more than once.”

Apart from the latest problem, elections officials — and the Postal Service itself — had previously warned that with Election Day on Nov. 3, it’s too late to depend on the mail to return a vote-by-mail ballot.

Drop boxes, which are officially called “secure ballot intake stations,” are available at all early voting locations from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. through Sunday, Nov. 1. Drop boxes are available at supervisor of elections offices on Nov. 2 and 3.

And people can vote in person at neighborhood polling stations from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m, on Election Day, Nov. 3.

Ways to verify

People can see if their mail ballot requests have been received, if the ballot’s been sent out from the elections office to the voter, if the completed ballot has been received at the elections office, and if it’s been counted.

Broward County: browardvotes.gov, 954-357-8683. Phones are answered weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Palm Beach County: votepalmbeach.gov, 561-656-6200. Phones are answered weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Election protection: Multiple public interest groups, including the League of Women Voters of Florida, Common Cause and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, operate an “election protection hotline” for people with questions or concerns. Call or text 866-687-8683.

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