Election Results Start at 7:15 P.M. Tuesday in Miami-Dade — Mail and Early Totals First, Precincts After
The first numbers Miami-Dade sees on Election Night are not Election Day's: results begin posting at about 7:15 p.m. with the vote-by-mail and early-voting totals, and precinct-by-precinct returns follow as polling places report.
Miami-Dade's Election Night has a starting time, and it is 7:15 p.m. on Tuesday. According to the City of Miami's official elections page for the November 3 general election, unofficial results will commence posting online at approximately 7:15 p.m. — fifteen minutes after the polls close — beginning with the two electorates that have already finished voting: the vote-by-mail totals and the early-voting totals.
That order matters for how Tuesday night should be read. Florida counts no votes before the polls close, so the 7:15 p.m. release is the whole pre-Election Day electorate at once — in Florida's case, the 5,401,055 early and mail ballots this desk reported as the final early count — before a single Election Day precinct is added. Individual precinct totals then come in as they are reported from the polling places through the evening, alongside the unofficial voter count tracking ballots cast by each method. A lead at 7:15 p.m. is a lead among early and mail voters only; the night is built to move after that.
Two deadlines sit inside the same hour. Mail ballots count only if the Supervisor of Elections has received them by 7 p.m. Tuesday — a postmark does not count — and on Monday and Election Day they can be hand-returned at only two places: Elections Headquarters in Doral (2700 NW 87th Avenue) and the Downtown Branch Office at the Stephen P. Clark Center (111 NW 1st Street). They cannot be dropped off at Election Day polling places. Polls themselves are open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday at each voter's assigned precinct, and anyone in line at 7 p.m. can still vote. Then, at 7:15, the counting the whole campaign has waited for becomes visible.
