In an election season when small numbers of votes can make a massive difference, more than 90,000 voters in Duval County are now considered inactive — about 15 out of every 100 registered voters. The number of voters who are one missed election away from being removed from the rolls has risen sharply since Florida changed its voting laws three years ago.

While there are efforts to mobilize voters across the political spectrum, there has not been as much local attention devoted toward people who are registered yet disconnected from the voting process.

Who’s inactive?

The Florida Department of State defines inactive voters as anyone who for whom election mail is undeliverable. “If after two (federal) general elections, the inactive voter fails to vote, change/update his or her voter registration record, or request a vote-by-mail ballot, the inactive voter is removed no later than the end of the calendar year,” state law says.

Duval County Supervisor of Elections Jerry Holland says the most common reason for a voter to become inactive is when they move.

“We do have a transient population here,” Holland says of the city with two major Navy bases. “We normally see at least 10% of our election mail that tells us the addressee is no longer here.”

The Southside’s 32256 ZIP code has the highest number of inactive voters: 6,607. A Jacksonville Today analysis finds three voting precincts in 32256, all in the Baymeadows area, with more than 20% of voters inactive.

“If the voter is no longer living there (and) the mail is non-forwardable, it will come back to us,” Holland says. “That will start the process of becoming inactive …It’s really about voters who move and don’t contact us.”

The 32218 ZIP code, which includes a huge swath of the Northside including the Pecan Park, Garden City and Oceanway neighborhoods, has 6,248 inactive voters. In two precincts there, with polling places at the Oceanway Community Center and Pecan Park Baptist Church, the percentage of inactive voters surpassed their voter turnout in August’s primary election.

Also among the top five Duval ZIP codes with the most inactive voters is Northwest Jacksonville’s 32209, with 4,562 inactive voters, a predominantly Black area that’s one of the most under resourced communities in Florida, where activists have long sought to increase voter engagement and participation.

Inactive voters can become active if they request a mail ballot or update their address on file with the Duval County Supervisor of Elections Office, as more than 3,000 did before the August primaries this year.

A change in the law

This year's is the first presidential election since the Florida Legislature passed Senate Bill 90 in 2021, which shortened the duration that vote-by-mail requests remain valid and limited ballot drop boxes, among other elections changes that Republicans said were necessary to increase elections security.

Senate Bill 90 passed along party lines with all locally elected Democrats opposed and all locally election Republicans in favor. The Florida Democratic Party continues to characterize the law as GOP-led voter suppression.

"Deeper analysis of inactive voter trends show that Black voters are the hardest hit by this intentional effort to make voters invisible, promoting further disengagement within minority communities that are already disenfranchised by gerrymandering and racially motivated voter suppression laws," Florida Democratic Party Executive Director Phillip Jerez wrote in an Aug. 13 memo.

Since the law's approval, the number of inactive voters in Duval County has skyrocketed, and they skew more heavily Democratic than before (42.4% are Democrats today vs. 37.7% in 2020). And, a Jacksonville Today analysis shows, a disproportionate share of inactive voters are Black (34.7%) and Hispanic (7.2%), though Black voters make up just 27.1% of the electorate and Hispanic voters just 6.5%.

In November 2020, Duval County Supervisor of Elections data show, 33,961 voters were inactive, representing about 5% of the electorate. As of Sept. 13, inactive voters had risen to 90,592, down slightly from 94,259 just prior to the August 2024 primaries.

Attempts to activate

Left-leaning advocacy group Florida Rising has focused its Jacksonville voter engagement effort on the Westside and Northwest Jacksonville. Its senior political advisor, former state Sen. Dwight Bullard, says because of the history behind Jacksonville’s consolidated government, those are areas where residents feel “unheard and (have) the idea that local government did not have their best interest at mind.”

Bullard says scores of voters, many of them Black or Latino, do not want to participate in elections because they don't believe their life will change by voting. Some of them may register for one election but not vote again.

“The inactivity of those voters comes from intentional efforts to disenfranchise them from local and state levels, from chopping up the congressional district in that area (and more)," Bullard says. "We’re never going to give up as an organization to try and engage, re-engage those voters, but it does make the task more difficult when you’re dealing with folks who have sought to undermine those voters.”

Holland, a Republican elected to oversee Duval voting, has spent most of this year encouraging people throughout Duval County to participate in the democratic process.

In March, Holland committed in front of an audience at Florida’s oldest Black church that his office would keep an early voting site at Edward Waters University as long as he served as supervisor. That precinct opened in August.

A local coalition of pastors, former elected officials, retired military officers and political organizers are also traversing Duval County's barbershops to encourage Black men to cast ballots.

“You have to be continuously vigilant that your name is on the ballot and you can vote,” said one of the activists, retired Rear Adm. Cedric Pringle, as the coalition announced their intentions in front of the Duval County Courthouse this month.

“We should all pay attention to the possibilities of what our future could look like,” Pringle said. “We should pay attention to what’s going on, so we don’t set up our children for a future that’s worse than what we enjoyed in our lifetimes.”

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Corrected: This story was updated on Sept. 16 to clarify the state's definition of an inactive voter.

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This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.