Our Observation

Early voting starts in just 11 days.

While the most publicized races are definitely for the U.S. Senate and governor, let’s not forget to consider the races that will most affect you as an Orange County resident.

These are also the races that won’t be spattered on your television set or littering your mailbox. You will have to seek out this information.

The Orange County mayoral seat is one of those.

District 5 County Commissioner Bill Segal and former County Commissioner Teresa Jacobs are in a runoff on Nov. 2 because neither nabbed more than 50 percent of the vote in the Aug. 24 primary.

We’ll be covering a League of Women Voters Orange County debate between the two that happens after press time. It will be interesting to see how many people attend the debate, which was scheduled from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Wednesday. Most people can’t take 2 hours off — 3 hours with travel time — in the middle of the day, no matter how devoted to local politics they are.

We’ll have a story in next week’s paper, which should fill in those of you that couldn’t make it.

Outside of that, voters have at their disposal the candidates’ websites and the articles in newspapers, including our daily paper, which mostly details fundraising wars and attack advertising campaigns.

Voters need to make sure to dig deeper to find out what the issues are and what these candidates are planning to do about them. That can take some time.

Sample ballots should have reached your mailbox this week, and it’s likely that you don’t know all of the candidates. You may have never heard of some of their names before. But it’s not too late.

Map out time during the next three weeks leading up to the Nov. 2 election to research and make an informed vote on who will best represent your needs as a citizen.

Also, Orange County Public Schools is asking you to allow them to raise taxes in the next fiscal year by $1 for every $1,000 of property that you own. The $85 million raised would go toward saving arts and athletics programs that would be cut when the stimulus-funding cliff hits in 2011.

And don’t forget the state amendments. There are six of them, including Hometown Democracy (4), which if passed would require voters to approve comprehensive plan land-use changes, and the fair districts amendments (5 and 6), which would set requirements for congressional redistricting. Then there’s Amendment 8, which seeks to loosen the class-size requirements, which you passed in 2002.

These are just three of the more well-known amendments. Make sure to study all of them. Look in next week’s Observer for an inserted guide that lays out each of the amendments and what happens with a “yes” vote and a “no” vote. The guide, brought to you by the League of Women Voters of Florida, also features question-and-answer sessions with candidates for U.S. Senate, governor, attorney general and more.

Our editorial staff will cover the amendments and the races that affect Winter Park and Maitland, on all levels, that appear on the November ballot.

Still undecided? Contact the campaigns themselves. It’s their job to talk to you.