By Ken Jackson
Staff Writer

Osceola County voters will decide whether elections for county commissioners should be non-partisan affairs in the Nov. 6 general election.

The county’s Supervisor of Elections office submitted a letter to the Board of County Commissioners on Monday morning, ahead of a midnight deadline, certifying that the Osceola Ballot Initiative had submitted “the requisite number of verified petitions” to be included on the November ballot

OBI, which has worked with the Kissimmee/Osceola County Chamber of Commerce and its president, Mike Horner, to accumulate the petitions and get them certified, presented 18,771 petitions on Friday. Since that total exceeded the 14,702 signatures required by more than 15 percent, Horner and OBI were able to request the elections office use a state statute-mandate method of verifying a random sampling of the petitions.

That verification of 100 petitions occurred Monday morning, but not without the effort of the Elections Office, which worked through the weekend to count, number and stack the petitions to allow the cross-referenced verification, Elections Office spokesperson Amber Smith said.

“I don’t believe this county has ever done it. There are procedures in place that this office followed,” she said. “A lot of work went into the preparation, we even hired a statistician to pull the random samplings.”

Horner praised Supervisor of Elections Mary Jane Arrington and her department for their efforts.

“The petitions are good, and this is a good thing for Osceola County voters,” he said. “The Supervisor of Elections’ team went the extra mile and put in the work to make this happen, and many thanks go to them for their promptness. This is very rarely done, and they worked quickly.”

Monday’s verification started the clock on an Aug. 30 deadline that the County Commission had to either set the date for a special election — at a cost to the county of $350,000 for what would likely be a low-turnout event, according to Horner — or place the charter initiative on the Nov. 6 general election.

Commissioners, in a special meeting on Tuesday, took care of that in short order by approving that the measure appear on the November ballot.