Voting hours not extended in Florida

Data glitch causes ballot issue at several polling places

ORLANDO, Fla. – The state and Orange County on Tuesday decided not to extend voting hours in Orange County at several precincts after data glitches that have caused issues at polling places.

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Orange County Supervisor of Elections Bill Cowles said a mutual agreement was made with the state not to extend voting after a review.

"A request was made to the secretary of state to extend voting an extra hour to 8 p.m. in precincts where municipal elections are taking place," Cowles said. "We are extremely disappointed that this happened to (the voters), but at this point we believe that we had backups and procedures in place to rectify it, and i think we're now ahead of the game and ballots are in the polling places."

Municipal elections were held in Apopka, Belle Isle, Maitland, Ocoee, Winter Park and Windermere.

Cowles said the issue was related to a data glitch.

"We have identified the cause of the problem and isolated the issue to precincts where municipal elections are also taking place," he said. "A data glitch caused the number of ballots printed for each party to be transposed with the non-partisan ballots for the municipal elections. We have heard of issues from about a dozen of the 251 precincts in Orange County, and those locations have already received or are currently receiving an adequate number of additional ballots."  

Cowles said measures were taken to ensure that every voter was able to cast a vote. 

  • Voters were immediately allowed to use the Express vote machines on location.
  • Mechanisms were triggered to allow anyone to come to the Supervisor of Elections Office at 119 West Kaley Avenue to vote.
  • Finally, if voters have had an issue and cannot return to the polling place, they can contact the SOE at 407-836-8683 (VOTE) immediately and we will send an elections office representative to you with an absentee ballot that will be counted.

Cowles said a valuable lesson has been learned.

"There's going to be a bunch more proofing and more check-off and validating things after this that we thought we already had in place," he said. "This is the first time that this happened to us, and it's the uniqueness, I think, of the city elections piggy-backing on a very active presidential preference primary."

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