The Jacksonville City Council on Tuesday unanimously approved $25,000 so the Duval County Supervisor of Elections can better engage with the large portion of the electorate who are inactive and face potential removal from the rolls. The funding was passed as an amendment to the new $1.7 billion city budget for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

Jacksonville Today was first to report that more than 90,000 voters in Duval County were considered inactive as of Sept. 15 (about 15% of registered voters), and activists have since pressured Supervisor of Elections Jerry Holland to do more to contact them ahead of the November elections about 40 days away.

Holland says the dollars will be used in two ways: $18,000 will be spent to email, call or text voters who have provided contact information and $7,000 will be devoted to advertising in Spanish language publications and Black-owned media to encourage voters to update their contact information. Black and Latino voters are overrepresented among inactive voters, a Jacksonville Today analysis found.

The dollars will be taken from a $1 million special council contingency fund.

In mid-September, 90,592 registered Duval County voters were considered inactive under the state’s definition: anyone who for whom election mail is undeliverable. The law states, “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.”

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No voter will be removed from the rolls in Duval prior to November’s elections, but after that, they could be. And voters’ addresses on file need to be current for them to be allowed to vote on Election Day.

Jacksonville ZIP codes with high concentrations of Black and Latino voters, on the Westside and in Northwest Jacksonville, are four of the five ZIP codes with the highest number of inactive voters.

Council member Jimmy Peluso, who sponsored the budget amendment to spend $25,000 on voter outreach, says he filed it after hearing former U.S. Rep Corrine Brown and former state lawmaker Tony Hill — both fellow Democrats — rally about the issue in front of the Supervisor of Elections Office. The speeches were part of a rally motivated by Jacksonville Today‘s reporting, activists said.

Last week, Holland briefly met with the activists from the Transformative Justice Coalition, the National Coalition of the Homeless, League of Women Voters Florida and others.

“This is a fundamental voting rights problem, and we demand that more be done to reach all of these voters to let them know that they have the right to vote, let them know they can re-establish their active status and to make sure they are aware,” civil rights lawyer Barbara Arnwine said at the time. “We are angry that such a huge percentage of these voters are African American…It has to stop.”

“This is just to make sure that individuals are aware that they might be (removed) from the list, after which they are able to go and re-register,” Peluso told the council before Tuesday’s vote.

While members Raul Arias and Ron Salem grumbled about the lateness of the amendment, the whole council agreed that doing everything possible to encourage registered voters to participate in democracy is too important.

“I don’t like this,” Arias said. “This is coming at the last minute at the last hour. This is to reach out to 88,000 voters. We had several budget hearing meetings. (Holland) assured us that he doesn’t need any more money. Here we are looking for $25,000 on budget night.”

Arias’ district includes the 32256 ZIP code, which has the highest number of inactive voters in Duval County.

Earlier this month, at a kickoff for Hispanic Heritage Month, Arias stressed the need for politicians to engage with Hispanic voters to close voter turnout gaps.

If you’re inactive

The Duval County supervisor of elections encourages anyone who may be inactive to update their address information and vote early.

“I do think that it pretty much touches all 14 city council districts, the entire city at large,” Peluso said. “…We want to make sure that anyone who shows up to the voting booth — if they, maybe, didn’t do the municipal election or, maybe, they didn’t do the primary and now they show up for the presidential — (is) not going to get turned away.”