Hundreds of thousands of registered voters in Florida are being asked to update their signatures.

If the signature on an absentee ballot doesn’t match what the elections office has on file, the vote can be tossed out.

Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Penelope Townsley sent letters to nearly 200,000 voters who have previously requested ballots by mail.

Steve Bousquet in the Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau says absentee voting has become so popular that an effort is underway to re-name it.

“We have legislation pending before the Florida Legislature where the word ‘absentee’ is going to be stricken from the statute books and replaced with ‘vote by mail,’ because it used to be you had to have an excuse," says Bousquet. " ‘I’m going to be out of town;' 'I’m going into the hospital.’ But not anymore. We have what’s known as ‘no-excuse absentee voting’ in Florida. You can vote by mail just because you feel like it, and so it’s becoming more popular.”

Almost one-third of the 6 million ballots cast in Florida in November of 2014 were by mail.

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