About two weeks after Sandra Maddox qualified to run for county commission in Santa Rosa County, a campaign poster for the frontrunner in her own race—incumbent and fellow party member James Calkins—strangely appeared in her own yard.
“The sign was right in front of her mailbox,” said Diane Warner, a local retiree who spends her free time researching elections. “I drove there and just stopped and took pictures.”
Diane Warner
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Florida Trident
The connection between Maddox and her on-paper political opponent goes deeper than just campaign posters. The Florida Trident learned that Maddox’s son, Roger Belanger, had worked for Calkins’ campaign, allegedly in league with his own mother, who is 80 years old and has been almost completely absent from the campaign.
Belanger received $5,000 from Calkins for “advertising,” campaign finance records show. In 2022, Calkins described Belanger as a “good friend” in a social media post.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Warner, a Republican voter. “They go to the limit of slimy, and then it gets boring.”
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Florida Trident
Maddox’s candidacy may seem absurd at first glance, but her entry as the third district candidate had profound implications. If Calkins had run unopposed as a Republican for the seat alone, Florida law would have made the primary open, allowing Democrats and independents to vote. However, when Maddox filed her candidacy, the primary was closed to all but Republicans, disenfranchising everyone else.
The bad news for non-Republican voters in Santa Rosa County doesn’t end there: Candidates registered to vote on the board of elections have won all three races for county commission seats, meaning about 52,000 registered voters in the county have no say in choosing their representative. Maddox, Belanger and Calkins did not respond to Trident requests for comment.
(Courtesy: Santa Rosa County)
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Florida Trident
The problem is widespread across the country. An analysis of candidate filings and voter registration data by Florida Trident found that more than two million voters across Florida were excluded from at least one state or local election this year because of a loophole in the state constitution that allows at-large candidates to avoid primary elections.
“They were used as dummy candidates,” said Ben Wilcox, research director at Integrity Florida, a nonpartisan research institute and government watchdog. “It’s a tactic that both parties use.”
“Ghost candidates” are candidates who are not serious about winning an election but want to influence the outcome. Wilcox explained that there are two types of these candidates: candidates who are not listed on the ballot to influence primaries, and candidates whose names appear on the ballot to steal votes from another candidate.
“Both types of candidates have one thing in common,” Wilcox said, “they are being used to manipulate elections.”
None of the write-in candidates in Santa Rosa have raised or spent money on their campaigns, and most do not live in the district they represent.
These are “warning signs” of possible fake candidates, Wilcox explained. “Most of them are not campaigning; they are simply not serious candidates.”
Florida is “infested” with ghost candidates in 2024
In 20 Florida counties, write-in candidates have won at least one local race. In Duval County, write-in candidates have won three legislative races, including Senate District 5 and House Districts 13 and 14.
“Florida is full of ghost candidates,” Wilcox said. “They’re everywhere in local (and state) elections. It’s just a real problem.”
The Trident reviewed candidate filing information and voter registration data from the State Board of Elections and the websites of all 67 county election officials in the state. The results show that candidates who appeared on the ballot disenfranchised 2 million registered voters in these counties: Brevard, Charlotte, Collier, Duval, Escambia, Flagler, Gadsden, Hernando, Indian River, Lake, Lee, Manatee, Marion, Martin, Putnam, Santa Rosa, Sarasota, St. Johns, St. Lucie, Sumter and Walton.
“They never win,” Wilcox explained. “Someone would have to launch a really extensive campaign to let people know that they want voters to sign their names so that they actually have a chance of winning this election.”
The open primary system was introduced by an amendment to the state constitution approved by voters in 1998.
Courtesy: Integrity Florida
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Florida Trident
“The hope was that it would reduce the extremes on both sides,” Wilcox said, adding that the amendment had failed to achieve its purpose. “The constitutional amendment did not address the free-choice candidates.”
In 2000, the state Board of Elections passed a rule requiring closed primaries when an out-of-district candidate qualified for the ballot. “The legislature did nothing,” Wilcox said.
Since the rule was introduced, “we’ve seen in Florida how candidates who are not registered in the district have been used as dummy candidates to prevent primaries,” Wilcox said. “Both Democrats and Republicans want to prevent their primaries. They want their voters to decide who the representative will be.”
Efforts to close the gap in write-in candidates have failed
In 2018, the Florida Constitutional Revision Commission considered a proposal to simply close the gap in write-in candidates, but it was rejected and never put to voters.
“They couldn’t get a majority to put this to a vote,” Wilcox said. “This is a solution to the whole problem.”
The proposal would have required an open primary election if an ineligible candidate enters a race where only one party’s candidates are on the ballot and there is no other opposing candidate in the general election. A 2017 bipartisan bill in the Florida Legislature that proposed the same solution was defeated in committee without a single vote.
Wilcox said lawmakers could discourage bogus candidates by making it harder for those candidates to qualify for the ballot. Unlike candidates whose names appear on the ballot, candidates who are not placed on the ballot do not have to pay filing fees or collect signatures. Having the same requirements would likely reduce the number of candidates who are not placed on the ballot, he explained.
The only way for voters to circumvent this loophole for write-in candidates is to change their party affiliation before the primaries.
After her recent move to Santa Rosa County, Ilana Porzecanski was unable to run in any state or local elections in 2022 because she is a Democrat and is barred from the Republican primaries due to at-large candidates on the ballot.
“To my great surprise, there were these phantom candidates who had not campaigned, had not raised any money for their campaign and were just there to close out the primaries,” she said.
This year, Porzecanski changed her party affiliation after learning that in three races for county commission seats, candidates who were not on the ballot had won the primaries.
“I decided to change my party affiliation to Republican so I could participate in this important local election,” she said. “I knew I couldn’t just get upset about it – I had to do something.”
About the author: Valerie Crowder is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Tallahassee, Florida. She is the founder and editor of The Panhandle Pressan independent local news website. The Florida Trident is an investigative news outlet focused on government accountability and transparency across Florida. The Trident was produced by the Florida Center for Government Accountability and first published in 2022.
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