Winter Park voters flock to polls

Voters turned out early and often at Orange County’s 10 early voting sites, despite a bomb scare that shut down a precinct and reports of long lines at the polls. And Tuesday get-out-the-vote efforts were pushing to drive some of the 150,000 new registered voters in Central Florida to the polls.

As a delivery driver handed him more stacks of absentee ballots, Orange County Supervisor of Elections Bill Cowles lamented that voters didn’t have more days to vote early compared to 2008.

“It was almost impossible to reach that number,” Cowles said about the 2008 election, when more than 20,000 more votes cast early compared to 2012. Voters had less early voting days this time around. “If we had one more full day we could have maybe done it.”

In all, 127,583 voters — more than a third of eligible voters — cast their ballots early across Orange County, including 10,980 at the Winter Park Library alone. That particular precinct drew national attention after police were forced to shut it down and detonate two suspicious packages that were found outside the Library just before noon on Saturday, Nov. 3.

Mayor Ken Bradley said he came back from an out-of-town trip when the report went out, visiting the precinct while police investigated.

Neither the cooler filled with electronics nor the black plastic bag filled with garbage were found to be harmful after police detonated them.

That shutdown led to an outcry from voters who demanded that the precinct be reopened the next day. That was not allowed under Florida’s new early voting laws, which curtailed available early voting days from 14 to 8 and outlawed voting on the Sunday before Election Day, a popular organized voting day for predominantly black churches.

A court order Sunday morning changed all that, opening the doors of the Winter Park precinct one more day for four hours to allow another 332 voters access to the polls.

“It seemed like it worked out well,” Bradley said. “Everybody was there to do their level-headed best.”

But there was a catch: The ballots would be provisional, and subject to scrutiny before they would be officially counted. Monday morning Cowles made it official, approving all of the Winter Park provisional ballots.

On Tuesday, the polls opened again, and Rollins College student Brock Monroe went to a bus stop in the middle of campus. On the other end of the route, the polling precinct at Winter Park High School’s 9th grade center waited with empty ballots.

“It’s been a good turnout so far,” Monroe said at 1 p.m. Tuesday. “The lines were bad this morning, but they’re not as long now.”

Monroe volunteered with the nonpartisan The Democracy Project at the college to get students excited about voting and drive them to the polls on a 15-passenger bus.

When some students arrived, they were greeted by a daunting wait rather than a brisk exercise in democracy.

“Some said they were afraid they couldn’t vote because the wait was too long,” Monroe said.

Cowles had been touring the county’s 227 voting locations all morning, seeing lines ranging from 20 minutes to 3 hours, the longest in areas where recent development led to population booms.

With another six hours left before polls closed, Cowles said he was hoping for a big turnout. With steady lines so far, he said he wouldn’t be surprised.

“We’ll wait and see how the numbers add up tonight,” he said.