Should Key Largo residents vote for Key West’s county commissioner? Should Big Pine voters have a say in Islamorada’s commission representative?
They do now and always have under Monroe County’s at-large voting process, in which all county voters select all five county commissioners to represent the Keys’ five different voting districts.
But a new movement in the Florida Keys would prefer single-member district voting, meaning county commissioners would be elected only by voters in each of the five geographic districts. (Commissioners, as now, must live in the district they represent.)
A political action committee known as Keys Regional Election Protection wants to ask Keys voters, on a 2022 ballot, if county commissioners should be elected via single-member districts rather than at-large. The group is circulating a petition, hoping to gather the 6,000 or so signatures needed to place the question on a county ballot.
“If everyone in the county votes for every commissioner, there’s a good chance that all five commissioners will be of the same mind. They’re also likely, as they are now, to all be members of the same political party,” said Chris Massicotte, who worked as a political consultant in Washington, D.C. before moving to Key West about five years ago. “We’re not trying to redraw the district boundaries, or change the number of commissioners or anything. We just want to change the way we elect our leaders to ensure that our county commissioners are directly accountable to the constituents in their districts and are more connected with the local issues of those voters.”
The committee’s website, keysrep.com, makes the argument for single-member voting by pointing out, “While county commissioners must LIVE in the district that they represent, the entire county votes on them.”
The committee also points out that the Florida Keys’ geography makes it difficult — and very costly — to campaign countywide.
Massicotte said all four seated county commissioners oppose the single-member measure. “No elected official is going to support a change that makes it easier for someone to defeat them,” he said.
But that’s not why former county commissioner Keith Douglass doesn’t support the change, he told the Keys Weekly on March 22. Douglass was a county commissioner from 1994 to 1998.
“We need to be more unified in the Keys, not more divided,” Douglass said. “County commissioners make decisions that affect everyone in the county, and when you’re making decisions that affect the whole county, you need to be elected by the whole county.”
Seated county commissioners Michelle Coldiron and Craig Cates agreed.
“At-large elections make commissioners accountable countywide,” Coldiron said. “Our county is so very diverse and by being at-large it requires the commissioners to be well educated and versed on all the issues they vote on. By being voted on at-large, any constituent can call me and know I am available to not only hear their concerns but to advocate on their behalf. In the past 16 months we have unfortunately had various empty seats on the commission and yet because we are at-large the remaining four commissioners have picked up the slack and been available to the residents in the district without a commissioner.”
Cates added that the current at-large voting process also benefits the voters, “Otherwise voters from one district may only have the vote of their own commissioner for an important issue, and in order to get anything passed, you need three out of five votes.”
But, Massicotte said, single-member voting could make it possible for more potential candidates to enter the political arena.
“It’s possible to knock on every door in Key Largo and really let people get to know you,” he said. “But to do that Keyswide takes more time and money than many would-be candidates have,” often limiting the political arena to candidates with the wealthiest supporters.
Single-member voting would allow voters to know their county commissioner better, and require the commissioners to really know their constituents, the committee says.
When asked what prompted the movement toward single-member voting, Massicotte said the 2020 election of Eddie Martinez over incumbent Democrat Heather Carruthers “was not the only reason” the petition was started. But, he added, it’s fair to say Martinez would not have been elected if the Keys had had single-member voting in 2020, as voters in that district supported Carruthers, not Martinez.
Massicotte said 18 of Florida’s non-charter counties, of which Monroe is one, have switched to single-member voting in recent years. Sarasota County voters were the most recent to implement the change.
Keys Regional Election Protection needs about 6,000 signatures by Aug. 23 to place the question on the general election ballot in November 2022.
The League of Women Voters in the Lower Keys will host a discussion about single-member voting featuring Massicotte, who supports it, and another speaker, who opposes it.
Petitions are available at keysrep.com.
