WINTER PARK, Fla. – Orange County Supervisor of Elections Glen Gilzean held a news conference Friday morning in Winter Park to announce “a substantial change” to early voting.
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.
“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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