More than 5,000 Democrats and 1,900 Republicans have turned in absentee ballots so far for Tuesday’s special primaries in congressional District 19, according to elections officials in Palm Beach and Broward counties.

Even allowing for the district’s overall Democratic tilt, the figures suggest more interest among Democrats than Republicans in the primaries. Democrats outnumber Republicans by a ratio of 2.1-to-1 in the district. Through this morning, returned Democratic absentee ballots outnumbered GOP ballots by a ratio of about 2.6-to-1.

Another 3,479 voters cast primary ballots at early voting sites between Jan. 25 and Sunday. Those figures aren’t broken down by party.

Democrats Ben Graber and Ted Deutch are running in the Democratic primary. Republicans Joe Budd, Curt Price and Ed Lynch are running in the Republican primary. The primary winners and no-party candidate Jim McCormick will run in an April 13 special election to replace U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler.

Negron: 60 percent of his votes were absentee ballots

Not Republican Joe Negron, who capitalized on absentee and early voting on his way to a landslide victory in Tuesday’s special state Senate election.

Before the polls even opened Tuesday morning in Senate District 28, Negron had locked up 20,273 absentee ballots and 1,682 early votes for his race against Democrat Bill Ramos.

That’s more than twice as many votes as Ramos got for the entire election, according to unofficial returns.

In other words, the 11,584 people who cast ballots for Negron at their precincts on Tuesday’s traditional election day could have stayed home and their candidate still would have won by a fat margin.

(more…)