Those who vote in Osceola County — the voters who cast their ballots during early voting the last two weeks, sent back Vote-By-Mail ballots, or who will vote Tuesday at their polling places — do so legally.
After Gov. Ron DeSantis announced last week his new Election Crimes and Security task force had arrested 20 people in July who had voted illegally in the 2020 election because they were felons whose voting rights had not been restored, voter integrity became a hot topic in Florida.
In Osceola County, Supervisor of Elections Mary Jane Arrington said the new task force provided the names of eight people who had registered to vote, who’d commit a crime if they cast ballots. She noted her office had already removed three of them, and were in the process of removing the other eight late last week.
“If you want to commit a felony, I don’t know if I can stop you. If you’ve registered to vote illegally and we catch you, that’s punishable as a third-degree felony,” Arrington said. “When you register, you take an oath that you are not a felon, or that you’ve had your rights restored. Convicted murders and sex offenders cannot do that.”
She did say that, while DeSantis’ new task force has pundits — Democratic primary candidate Nikki Fried said she’d “disband this force and return jurisdiction back to local authorities” if elected — it is actually helping her office locally.
“Those charges were hard to prosecute. This new group is going to give us the help we need to do that,” Arrington said.
The SOE sends out lists of county residents who have an issue with their voter registration in public notices, particularly prior to (and during) the election cycle — two pages of them ran in a recent Osceola News-Gazette legal notice.
“Most of them, we have an issue with their address, but there may be felons or those adjudicated mentally incompetent,” Arrington said. “We always make sure to keep them off the rolls.”
Primary early voting “slow”: Arrington also noted that voter turnout in Osceola County for early voting and mail-in ballots that have been returned has been slow, barely reaching 10 percent of registered voters entering early voting’s final weekend.
“I talk with other counties’ election officials, and everybody is slow,” Arrington said.
This primary is following the profile of past ones — slow. Even in 2020, when the general election saw an impressive 73 percent of county voters do so, only 23 percent did in the primary. The last midterm election (2018) saw a 20 percent primary turnout and 53 percent in the general election, per the SOE office.
