Sheriff Eric Flowers was re-elected last week with a total of 9,667 votes.
To put this into perspective:
- We live in a county of 170,000 people and nearly 120,000 registered voters, more than 60,000 of whom declared their turnout as Republicans when they went to the polls two Tuesdays ago.
- More than 40,000 residents cast their votes, including the more than 26,000 Republicans who were allowed to participate in the party’s closed primary for the sheriff’s post.
- Nearly 17,000 of those more than 26,000 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 given the sheriff’s office during his troubling first term. But Flowers managed to pull off a narrow victory, but stumbled across the finish line with the support of just 8 percent of the county’s registered voters.
However, in order to be re-elected, it was not necessary for him to be the people’s candidate.
He did not need to appeal to the 40 percent of the district’s voters – those who were unaffiliated, registered as Democrats or members of another party – who were excluded from this primary.
As it turned out, it was not even necessary to appeal to the Republican majority in this three-way race.
The reason is that Florida’s election laws – which allow at-large candidates on the ballot to influence local primaries in what are supposed to be nonpartisan elections and to win multi-candidate primaries with a majority of the vote – are almost as ill-conceived as most of the education laws passed in the state recently.
Enter Deborah Cooney.
Four years ago, Cooney ran for sheriff with no party affiliation and a campaign that began with bizarre and unsubstantiated claims about the existence of law enforcement mafias and drug cartels. It was no surprise that she lost a landslide to Flowers in the general election.
Now she is running again, still clinging to many of the same outrageous corruption allegations she made in 2020, but a campaign is not in sight.
This time, however, Cooney is running as a write-in candidate, meaning she did not have to pay a filing fee to the county elections office or collect signatures on a petition to qualify.
That’s right. No collecting signatures. No registration fee. She simply filled out a form.
Cooney’s name will not appear on your November ballot, but by filling out the form last week, she denied nearly 58,000 registered non-Republicans the opportunity to participate in the primary election that for decades has decided who holds the most powerful elected office in our county.
The law allows her to run, and no one here – no Democrat or other disenfranchised voter in the county – cared enough to go to court and challenge her placement in the race.
From a purely political perspective, none of the legitimate candidates for sheriff could have taken such a measure without appearing to be courting non-Republican votes in the Republican primary.
As a result, only 9,380 Democrats, 4,046 unaffiliated voters, and 533 members of other parties participated in the election, even though they knew that the election for sheriff would not be on their ballots.
More than 1,200 non-Republicans switched their party affiliation before the election, giving them a say in who will be our sheriff for the next four years, but there is no way to find out who they voted for.
Regardless, there is little doubt that Cooney was able to change the outcome of the primary by providing the politically troubled Flowers with the shield he needed to fend off his Republican challengers, Fellsmere Police Chief Keith Touchberry and retired sheriff Captain Milo Thornton.
Certainly, Touchberry (8,423) and Thornton (8,300) hurt each other by splitting Flower’s opponents’ votes almost evenly in an election that should have given the incumbent cause for concern about his standing in the community rather than celebrating an implausible victory.
We can only hope, however, that Flowers, who won a four-candidate primary in 2020 with a whopping 62 percent of the vote, was humbled enough by his dubious performance this time to realize that he probably would not have won a one-on-one race against Touchberry or Thornton.
One would also like to believe that Flowers has the awareness to know that without Cooney he almost certainly would not have been re-elected.
A statewide election open to all voters would likely have improved the chances of Flowers’ two challengers in the primaries.
Flowers was unpopular with local Democrats, and many of them took to social media to voice their opposition.
On the other hand, Flowers was not particularly popular with most local Republicans.
Not that it matters now.
We can demand that future sheriff elections be bipartisan. We can complain about out-of-district candidates shutting down local primaries. But we need enough people in enough districts making enough noise to be heard by our state legislators in Tallahassee.
Otherwise, nothing will change, and when the next sheriff election comes around in 2028, we can expect to still be faced with the same frustrations we feel now.
