On April 18, the Florida Supreme Court issued a new opinion in Orange County, Florida v Singh, SC18-79. It reverses the same court’s January 4, 2019 opinion in the same case. The issue is whether counties may choose to have non-partisan elections for their own executive officers. The new opinion says state election law requires these elections to be partisan.
The voters of Orange County had passed a ballot measure to have non-partisan elections for Clerk of Circuit Court, Comptroller, Property Appraiser, Sheriff, Supervisor of Elections, and Tax Collector, but that measure is now ruled invalid.
Orange County is one of Florida’s most populous counties, and includes Orlando. Democrats generally outpoll Republicans in Orange County. In 2016, the vote for president in Orange County was: Hillary Clinton 329,894; Donald Trump 195,216. Democrats in Orange County favor partisan elections and Democratic officials filed this lawsuit. The lower courts had ruled against non-partisan elections. The first opinion of the State Supreme Court had ruled in favor of non-partisan elections. After it came out, the losing side asked for clarification, and in a surprise, the court changed its mind.
FL court hacks got command orders TO SWITCH from Devil City ???
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NON-partisan elections for ALL elected exec officers and ALL judges – VIA APPV – PENDING CONDORCET.
The January 4 decision to overturn the lower court’s decision was a 4-3 vote.
Three justices were required to retire because of age (over 70), and the governor appointed 3 new justices.
The three retired justices had been 3/4 of the majority opinion in January. The three new justices voted with the January dissenters to form a 6-1 majority. The lone dissenter in April, was the only holdover from the January majority. It is unknown whether the fact that the decision was made so late in the term, had any impact on the decision to review the case.
Ironically, voters in November 2018 approved increasing the mandatory retirement age for judges to 75.
The county commissioners in Orange County are elected on a non-partisan basis. It is likely that this is now subject to a legal challenge. Apparently, it was the widespread opinion that charter counties could switch to nonpartisan elections.
There have been AG rulings that the legislature could not switch individual counties to non-partisan elections because of a ban in the constitution against local legislation.
An oddity of the January decision was that Orange County could remove the party labels, but could not have non-partisan elections. In Florida non-partisan elections are conducted in the primary, with a runoff in November. Instead, Orange County would have conducted a general election with no runoff.
The decision will likely provide impetus to the Top 2 initiative.
How many 2019 Sun-stroke IDIOTS in the FL regime still around since the 2000 Bush v Gore bunch of IDIOTS ???