Orange County's Canvassing Board Sits Down at 2 P.M. Today at Kaley Street to Canvass the Vote-by-Mail Ballots

The least watched and most consequential meeting of Orange County's election happens this afternoon, in public, at a table on Kaley Street. The 2026 Orange County Canvassing Board convenes at 2 p.m. Monday at the Supervisor of Elections office, 119 W. Kaley Street in Orlando, for the canvassing of vote-by-mail ballots, according to the Supervisor's official public meeting notice. Canvassing is the board's line-by-line judgment work on the mail vote — the ballots whose envelopes, signatures and eligibility questions cannot be settled by a tabulator alone.

The board has three members: Judge Jeanette Bigney, County Commissioner Substitute Deb Blechman, and Supervisor of Elections Karen Castor Dentel, with Camille Evans, Judge Steve Jewett and Judge Brian Duckworth as alternate members, the notice states. Its meetings are open to the public under Florida's Government-in-the-Sunshine Law, and any amendment to its schedule or agenda is posted on the Supervisor's website at voteorangefl.gov. The same office that takes hand-delivered mail ballots at Kaley Street — the errand this station's morning voter file urged on readers — is the room where those ballots are canvassed.

Today's session is the first of two in the election's final 48 hours. On Tuesday at 4 p.m., the board convenes again for the canvassing of vote-by-mail ballots and, in the notice's words, will also oversee the returns of Election results — the session that sits in the room while Orange County's numbers come in after polls close at 7 p.m. Nothing about today's 2 p.m. meeting produces a result anyone can report yet, and this desk reports none. What it produces is the part of the count that happens in the open, with names attached — which is, on the day before Election Day, exactly what it is for.