Elections officials reported very few problems
Osceola County saw its highest percentage of registered voters cast a ballot in over 30 years in the recent Nov. 5 election.
County elections officials chalk up the numbers to the highest voter turnout of a cycle being during the general election in a presidential election year, but it still slightly beat projections locally.
A total of 174,423 ballots—the highest number ever, but local population is swelling—have been cast via mail-in ballots, early voting and on Election Day—representing 74.39% of the county’s 234,462 registered and eligible voters.
With early voting—nearly 88,000 or just about half of the ballots— being the popular choice year followed by mail in ballots (47,259) and Election Day voting (39,256), it resulted in some lines and longer waits at polling sites.
“We are an event planner for a big and important event,” Supervisor of Elections Mary Jane Arrington said.
“It goes on for two weeks, and nobody has to RSVP.”
She said that, going forward, she’s going to look for another early voting site on the east side of the county. Currently the St. Cloud and Narcoossee community centers serve that area.
“We’ve got lots of rooftops going up along Nova Road and areas around there, and we need to find a facility we can use for two weeks,” Arrington said.
She called it “a good election,” with all pre-Election Day votes cast reported on the SOE website soon after the polls closed at 7 p.m., and all Election night votes tabulated and posted before 9 p.m. The office pared down its website to be able to handle the web traffic an election generates.
“We fixed that after the primary, so we prepared the website,” Arrington said. “And our precincts have the newest tabulation equipment, so everything got reported very timely.”
The only quirk Arrington said happened last Tuesday was a temporary loss of connectivity to the state’s voter database, used on Election Day to resolve issues with the residency of any voter who was previously registered to vote in another county prior to Nov. 5.
“We can resolve those on Election Day, and if somebody had moved within Osceola County we had that and it was simple,” she said. “That loss of connectivity slowed things down earlier in the day, and most of that was on the western side of the county, where if you move across the street it’s easy to cross a county line.”
The Election office did catch one break. If any recounts for any races within a 0.5% margin were necessary, they would have been over the weekend, but no county races were that close.
“So we were able to leave on Friday and enjoy our weekend,” Arrington said.
Coincidently with the higher voter turnout, or not, this was also the first time since 1992 that Osceola “turned red” in the presidential race, although by a slim margin (50.04% for Republican Donald Trump, 48.59% for Democrat Kamala Harris). Some of the other presidential elections over the last seven cycles were also small margins for the Democratic candidate.
Senate Republican Rick Scott (49.92%) also carried Osceola County over Democratic challenger Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (47.86%).
On the flip side, in seven partisan races in Osceola County, voters chose to keep Democrat incumbents in office. That included District 1 and 3 county commissioners Peggy Choudhry and Brandon Arrington, Sheriff Marcos Lopez, Clerk of Court Kelvin Soto, Tax Collector Bruce Vickers, Property Appraiser Katrina Scarborough and Mary Jane Arrington herself, elected to a fifth term to run the election process in Osceola County.
“That’s definitely an odd position to be in, making sure our staff got everything done while I was watching the results of my race,” she said.
