The Campus Lines Were the Story: 5,535 Early Ballots at FSU and 2,541 at FAMU — Roughly Triple and Five Times Their 2022 Totals
Tallahassee's two university early-voting sites did not just beat their last midterm — they lapped it, and the elections office calls the campus numbers a rough measure of a student electorate that showed up.
The clearest turnout signal in Leon County's early voting did not come from a precinct map. It came from two student unions. According to the Leon County Supervisor of Elections, 5,535 people cast early ballots at the Florida State University Student Union site during the Oct. 19–Nov. 1 early voting period, and 2,541 at the Florida A&M University Student Union site. In the most recent comparable election, the 2022 general election, those same sites recorded 1,985 and 507 ballots — meaning FSU's site nearly tripled its midterm total and FAMU's grew fivefold.
The elections office is careful about what the numbers mean: both campus sites were open to every Leon County voter, and students could also vote by mail to home counties or at any other county site, so the site totals are, in Public Information Specialist Alice Mosca's words to the FSView, a "rough approximation" of student turnout. The party detail is not rough at all — by the end of early voting, registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans by about six to one among ballots cast at the FSU site, and by almost sixty to one at FAMU.
The surge had organizers behind it. On Oct. 29, campus groups marched with mayoral candidate Jeremy Matlow and City Commission candidate PJ Perez in a "Noles to the Polls" walk from Westcott Fountain to the Student Union, where about 50 students voted alongside the candidates; the day drew 674 ballots, the site's second-highest single day of the period. Site clerk Joseph Rodriguez, who spent the period untangling students' registration questions, said the FSU site finished as the third-busiest early voting location in the county. On Tuesday, the same voters must go to their assigned precincts — the campus free-for-all of early voting is over, and what remains is whether the surge follows them there.
