Where We Stand:

Florida’s state lawmakers should not give up on ethics and voting reforms.

After a promising start, it’s looking like another bad year for good government in Florida.

Recently Speaker Richard Corcoran highlighted one of the biggest failures of this year’s legislative session when he blasted the Senate for failing to act on a House package of ethics reforms. “The Senate has shown us they have expressed zero interest in holding elected officials accountable and draining the swamp,” said Corcoran, a Republican from Land O’Lakes.

Squandering an opportunity

We share the speaker’s disdain for the indifference among Senate leaders to the House’s ethics reform initiative. It included several worthy elements, including an extension of the ban from two years to six years on former legislators and statewide elected officials lobbying state government, limits on contacts between legislators and lobbyists, and more detailed financial disclosure from local officials.

President Joe Negron, a Republican from Stuart, said he was “content” with the status quo. He has squandered a golden opportunity to hold government in Florida to higher ethical standards.

But House and Senate leaders share the blame for ignoring a chronic abuse of the electoral process practiced by Republicans and Democrats.

Exploiting a loophole

In Florida, party primary elections are closed, with only voters registered with the party permitted to cast ballots to choose its nominees. But voters amended the state constitution in 1998 to open primaries to all voters when the winners would face no competition in the general election.

In 2000, the state Elections Division concluded a single write-in candidate in the general election would be enough to close a primary, even if the winner would face no competition in November from a major-party candidate. Since then, candidates and their operatives from both parties have exploited this loophole to close primaries with sham write-in candidates.

Closing a primary this way excludes voters from other parties as well as independents from any meaningful choice at the polls. In last year’s legislative elections, write-ins closed primaries in six Senate districts, including two in Central Florida, and 14 House districts. According to the Tampa Bay Times, 1.6 million voters were disenfranchised in these races.

Disenfranchising Orange-Osceola voters

Write-ins also closed local races throughout Florida, including the race for state attorney in Orange and Osceola counties. Democrat Aramis Ayala, now under fire for refusing to seek the death penalty in any cases, defeated Democratic incumbent Jeff Ashton in a primary closed by a write-in. More than half a million Republicans and third-party or unaffiliated voters in Orange and Osceola counties — the majority of voters in the circuit — didn’t get a shot at choosing their state attorney in the only election when the outcome was in question.

Yet a bill filed in this year’s legislative session to close the write-in loophole never got a hearing in the House. Nor was a companion bill even filed in the Senate. Leaders in both parties in Tallahassee would rather keep this power to game the system.

Ignore the silence

Corcoran has said he’s not giving up on the House ethics package, and might ask the Constitution Revision Commission to consider its reforms. The commission, whose members began meeting last month, has the power to put proposed constitutional amendments on next year’s ballot for possible voter approval. We hope they hear the House on ethics reform.

But we also hope commission members ignore the silence from the Capitol on the write-in loophole, and heed the pleas to close it from other Floridians, including Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg.

“It’s hard to ask politicians who benefit from the system to change this system,” he said. But if the commission is more interested in doing right by voters, putting an amendment to close the write-in loophole on next year’s ballot is an easy call.