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Mary Jane Arrington -
Votes are being counted on Nov. 3 at the Osceola County Supervisor of Elections Office before polls closed at 7 p.m. News-Gazette Photo/rachel christiaN
Osceola County registered voters set a new record by casting more ballots during the recent election than ever before, according to the Supervisor of Elections Office.
In total, 173,440 ballots were casted out of the 239,027 registered county voters, equaling 72.56 percent.
“Overall, the turnout was fantastic,” said Supervisor of Elections Mary Jane Arrington. “Early voting and mail-in ballots blew us out of the park.”
A total of 71,339 people voted early, and the Elections Office mailed out 100,000 with 78 percent being returned.
“That’s just unreal,” Arrington said.
It was election that saw the first Hispanic sheriff earn the post – Marco Lopez.
And Olga Gonzalez will be Kissimmee’s first female Hispanic mayor after getting the win.
Ricky Booth will jump from the Osceola County School Board to the Osceola County Commission.
And Fred Hawkins Jr. will go from the commission to represent State House District 42 after beating his opponent.
Normally, the busiest polling stations are in St. Cloud or Poinciana. But an unlikely area made the list this year – Holopaw.
Holopaw is a rural area in southern Osceola County with about 5,000 residents.
“We were really busy in Holopaw. It’s not a real large polling location,” Arrington said. “We had to send more people to work in the middle of the day. If you would have told me that in the beginning of the day, I’d say, ‘No, I don’t think so.’”
The General Election on Nov. 3 did not go without some hiccups. During the day, a polling station at Discovery Intermediate School was put on lockdown as a precaution after the Osceola County Sheriff ’s Office SWAT team was serving a warrant at a home in the area.
“I didn’t exactly know how a lockdown worked, but evidently when they lock you down no matter where you are, that’s where you are. So, we had voters locked in the location,” Arrington said.
The lockdown lasted for about an hour.
Then later, while ballots were being counted, a nearby construction crew accidently cut a fiber-optic cable, knocking out the Internet.
Due to the outage, poll workers had to hand deliver ballots from across the county to the Supervisor of Elections office in Kissimmee to be counted.
It was out for about two hours.
At the end of the election, Arrington hoped she would have seen an 80 percent turnout, but was still pleased with the numbers.
“In a pandemic, that’s a good showing,” she said.
