WINTER PARK, Fla. – If you’re planning to vote in Orange County, be prepared to wait a while. Voters say you can find long lines at just about every polling place around.
“We waited about 40 minutes,” said Ida Peterson. “We went to eat first because we passed by and saw the lines. (...) The ballot was another thing. Sometimes I would look them up and I still wouldn’t know which one to do. You vote YES, you get this, you vote NO, you get this.”
In response to the long lines, Orange County Supervisor of Elections Glen Gilzean held a news conference Friday morning in Winter Park to announce “a substantial change” to early voting.
Through powers granted by an executive order signed by Gov. DeSantis in light of recent hurricanes Helene and Milton, Gilzean announced Valencia College’s Winter Park Campus will be available to use as an early voting “express site” starting on Saturday and that an interactive map launched Friday to show real-time waits at the county’s early voting locations. He’s hoping to cut in-person wait times to 15 minutes.
“I want to encourage voters to take advantage of early voting. I said it multiple times: we plan for back-to-school, we plan for a storm, you have to plan to vote. This is the longest ballot in history. It’s two pages, two pages dual-sided, and it’s really taking a lot of time. As I go to all the EV sites and I talk to voters, they’re shocked that it is this long,” Gilzean said. “(…) I’ve actually talked to a couple of voters and they’re like, ‘I had to wait in line for about an hour and a half. What are you going to do about it?’ And this is our reaction of just making sure that other voters don’t get disenfranchised by long lines.”
Gilzean said the Valencia College Winter Park site will be dubbed an “express site” because it’s meant to be seen as an extension of the nearby Winter Park Library site. As such, it won’t show up on the SOE’s list of early voting sites. The addition of at least three express sites is targeted, with hopes of as many as 10, pending back-and-forth with the county.
According to Gilzean, just under 80,000 people had voted early in Orange County at the time of the news conference, with another 80,000 vote-by-mail ballots returned so far.
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