Sheriff Eric Flowers won re-election last week with a total of 9,667 votes.
To put that in perspective:
- We live in a county with a population of 170,000 and nearly 120,000 registered voters, more than 60,000 of whom were card-carrying Republicans when they went to the polls two Tuesdays ago.
- More than 40,000 residents cast ballots, including the 26,000-plus 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 for the quality of leadership Flowers has provided the Sheriff’s Office during a disturbing first term. But Flowers managed to eke out a victory, stumbling across the finish line with the support of only 8 percent of the county’s registered voters.
To get re-elected, however, there was no need for him to be the people’s choice.
He didn’t need to appeal to the 40 percent of county voters – those registered with no party affiliation, or as Democrats, or as members of some other party – who were shut out of this primary.
As it turned out, engaged in a three-way race, he didn’t need to appeal to even a majority of Republicans.
That’s because Florida’s election laws – which allow write-in candidates to close primaries in local races that should be nonpartisan, and candidates to win multi-candidate primaries with a plurality – are almost as ill-conceived as most of the state’s recently enacted education statutes.
Enter Deborah Cooney.
Four years ago, Cooney ran for sheriff with no party affiliation and a campaign launched with bizarre and unsubstantiated claims of law-enforcement mafias and drug cartels. To no one’s surprise, she lost to Flowers in a general-election landslide.
Now she’s running again, still clinging to many of the same unhinged allegations of corruption she spewed in 2020, but with no visible sign of a campaign.
This time, though, Cooney is running as a write-in candidate, which means she was not required to pay a filing fee to the county’s Supervisor of Elections Office or gather signatures on a petition to qualify.
That’s right. No collecting signatures. No filing fee. She simply filled out a form.
Cooney’s name will not appear on your November ballot, but by filling out the form, she deprived nearly 58,000 non-Republican registered voters from having the opportunity last week to participate in the primary that for decades has determined who occupies the most powerful elected office in our county.
The law allows her to run, and nobody here – no 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 sheriff’s candidates could have taken such action without creating the appearance of pandering for non-Republican votes in the GOP primary.
So only 9,380 Democrats, 4,046 no-party-affiliation voters and 533 members of other parties turned out for the election, knowing the sheriff’s race would not be on their ballots.
More than 1,200 non-Republicans did change their party affiliation prior to the election, enabling them to have a voice in choosing our sheriff for the next four years, but there’s no way to know for whom they voted.
Regardless, there’s little doubt that Cooney altered the primary’s outcome, giving the politically wounded Flowers the shield he needed to fend off his Republican challengers, Fellsmere Police Chief Keith Touchberry and retired sheriff’s Captain Milo Thornton.
To be sure, Touchberry (8,423) and Thornton (8,300) hurt each other, splitting almost evenly the anti-Flowers votes in an election that should’ve given the incumbent more cause for concern about his stature in the community than reasons to celebrate an unconvincing victory.
We can only hope, however, that Flowers, who received a whopping 62 percent of the vote to win a four-candidate primary in 2020, was humbled enough by his dubious showing this time to realize that he probably would not have won a one-on-one race against either Touchberry or Thornton.
You’d also like to believe Flowers possesses the awareness to know he almost certainly would not have been re-elected without Cooney.
A countywide election open to all voters probably would’ve enhanced the chances of both of Flowers’ primary challengers.
Flowers was not popular among local Democrats, many of whom used social media to express their opposition.
Then again, Flowers wasn’t exactly beloved by most local Republicans, either.
Not that it matters now.
We can demand that future sheriff’s 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, when the next sheriff’s election rolls around in 2028, we can expect to still be confronting the same frustrations we’re feeling now.
