Change needed: Written primaries should not be a closure

Sheriff Eric Flowers was re-elected last week with a total of 9,667 votes.

To put it into perspective:

• We live in a county of 170,000 people with nearly 120,000 registered voters, more than 60,000 of whom were officially Republican when they went to the polls two Tuesdays ago.
• More than 40,000 residents cast ballots, including the more than 26,000 Republicans who were allowed to participate in the party’s closed primary for sheriff.
• Nearly 17,000 of those 26,000-plus Republicans — more than 60 percent of them — wanted one of his opponents to replace him.

That’s hardly a vote of confidence in the quality of leadership Flowers has provided the Sheriff’s Office during a troubling first term. But Flowers pulled off a victory, stumbling across the finish line with the support of just 8 percent of the county’s registered voters.

However, to be re-elected, it was not necessary that he be the people’s choice.
He did not have to appeal to the 40 percent of the county’s voters — those who registered without a party preference, as Democrats or as members of another party — who were excluded from this primary.

In the end, it turned out that since he was in a three-way race, he didn’t even need to appeal to a majority of Republicans.

That’s because Florida’s election laws — which allow candidates who file without the right to vote to run in primaries in local elections that are supposed to be nonpartisan, and allow candidates to win multi-candidate primaries with a majority of votes — are nearly as poorly thought out as most of the state’s recently passed education laws.

Meet Deborah Cooney.

Four years ago, Cooney ran for sheriff without any party affiliation and launched a campaign that was filled with outlandish and unsubstantiated claims about law enforcement mafia and drug cartels. Not surprisingly, she lost to Flowers in a landslide in the general election.

Now she is running again, but she is still sticking to the same unfounded allegations of corruption that she made in 2020. However, there is no sign of a campaign.

This time, however, Cooney is running as a write-in candidate, meaning she does not have to pay an application fee to the county Supervisor of Elections Office or collect signatures on a petition to qualify.

That’s right. No signature gathering. No application fee. She just filled out a form.

Cooney’s name won’t appear on your November ballot, but by filling out the form last week, she denied nearly 58,000 registered voters who are not Republicans the chance to participate in the primaries that for decades have determined who holds the most powerful elected office in our region.

The law allows her to run, and no one here – not a Democrat or other disenfranchised voter in the county – cared enough to go to court to challenge her place in the race.

From a purely political perspective, none of the legitimate candidates for sheriff could have taken such action without appearing to solicit votes from non-Republicans in the Republican Party primaries.

So only 9,380 Democrats, 4,046 nonpartisan voters, and 533 members of other parties showed up for the election, knowing that the sheriff election would not be on their ballots.

More than 1,200 non-Republicans changed their party affiliation before the election, giving them a vote in choosing our sheriff for the next four years. However, there is no way to know who they voted for.

Regardless, there’s little doubt that Cooney influenced the outcome of the primary and gave the politically bruised Flowers the shield he needed to fend off his Republican challengers, Fellsmere Police Chief Keith Touchberry and retired sheriff’s Capt. Milo Thornton.

It is certainly true that Touchberry (8,423) and Thornton (8,300) hurt each other by splitting the vote almost equally for Flowers in an election that should have given the incumbent more reason to worry about his standing in the community than to celebrate an unconvincing victory.

One can only hope, however, that Flowers, who won a whopping 62 percent of the vote in 2020 to win the four-way primary, was humbled enough by his questionable performance this time around to realize that he probably wouldn’t have won a head-to-head race against either Touchberry or Thornton.

You’d also like to believe that Flowers realizes that he almost certainly wouldn’t have been re-elected without Cooney.

A national election open to all voters would likely have improved the chances of Flowers’ two challengers in the primaries.

Flowers were unpopular with local Democrats, many of whom took to social media to voice their opposition.

Then again, Flowers wasn’t exactly well-liked by most local Republicans either.

That doesn’t matter anymore.

We can demand that future sheriff elections be nonpartisan. We can complain about write-in candidates closing local primaries. But we need enough people in enough counties to make enough noise to be heard by our state legislators in Tallahassee.

Otherwise, nothing will change and we can expect to continue to face the same frustrations in the next sheriff election in 2028 as we do now.