Supervisor of Elections puts early voting wait times on home page
ST. CLOUD, Fla . - In Osceola County, early voters don’t have to wait in lines if they don’t want to.
The Osceola County Supervisor of Elections has made it easy: log onto her website and you can see how far you are from each early voting location and the wait time.
On Friday, six of their eight locations had green lights next to them on the website, meaning the wait to vote was less than 15 minutes. Two had yellow lights next to them, meaning the wait time was less than a 30-minute line.
The light was yellow on the website when Charlotte Burgard arrived at the 17th Street Civic Center in St. Cloud. FOX 35 News timed it from when she entered the building until when she finished voting and left. It took her less than 13 minutes.
“Oh wow, yeah! There were a couple people in front of me. It was fast, efficient,” Burgard said.
Most early voters who FOX 35 News spoke with didn’t even know about the website. Elections Supervisor Mary Jane Arrington said her crews update them throughout the day.
“When the line starts to form, we hand them a paper, a little sheet of paper with the time on it and when the check-in they give that to the person that’s checking them in and we know how long they’ve waited so the person at the polling location can enter it into the computer,” Arrington said.
Arrington said she is pleased with what she has seen so far -- lots of voters getting in and out without having to wait too long to vote. She said lots of folks are early voting this year.
“Usually the first day is busy and the rest of the week we see about half the numbers on the next three or four days. Our numbers have been almost the same as the first day. We’re averaging around 6,000 a day,” Arrington said.
She warns lines will get longer the closer we get to Election Day as more folks will start voting. Arrington is urging early voters to check her website before heading out to the polls if they want to avoid long lines.
“Where or when, because some places haven’t had wait times at all. A couple of our locations have had wait times steady most of the week,” Arrington said.
Early voting ends November 1.