South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Put competence over politics at elections office
Klitzman for supervisor
The Aug. 18 ballot for Broward Supervisor of Elections offers a lot of familiar names, including a former chair of the Broward Democratic Party, a former Oakland Park mayor, a former Broward School Board member and a former school board candidate.
We like the newcomer — Chad Klitzman — best.
He reminds us of Pete Buttegieg, who from a young age knew that he wanted to be president. In Klitzman’s case, “I have been passionate about elections for my entire life.”
“Before I could even vote, I was the President of Kids Voting Broward – the countywide voting initiative for young people – and served as the Student Ambassador to the Broward League of Cities, which awarded me their scholarship and afforded me a platform to lobby elected officials on voter engagement issues.”
Klitzman is smart. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015 and with honors from Columbia Law School three years later.
He’s engaging. “Being named Chad, and being from Broward, it was impossible to not have an appreciation for the notion that every vote really does count.”
He’s hard-working. Since filing for election in November 2019, he said he’s visited every Florida county elections office to discover best practices. We checked with some of the supervisors he met. They were similarly impressed.
He’s openly gay and champions the importance of diversity and inclusiveness.
And he’s a natural leader. He’s organized about 80 volunteers into a people-powered campaign team that holds Zoom calls three times a week and makes daily calls to Broward voters, urging them to get mail ballots and vote for Chad.
The biggest knock on Klitzman is that he’s young. But at 26, he wouldn’t be the youngest person ever elected elections supervisor in Florida. Kurt Browning was 22 when he was elected Pasco County’s supervisor. Browning went on to serve as president of the supervisors’ association, where he oversaw the transition from touch-screen voting machines to paper optical-scan ballots. He later served as former Gov. Charlie Crist’s Secretary of State and is now Pasco’s elected superintendent of schools.
After law school, Klitzman worked for a year at the New York law firm of Paul, Weiss, at a salary of $157,000, representing JetBlue. During the 2018 election, he worked on voter protection issues on a Montana Indian reservation. In 2014, he interned at the Obama White House, helping coordinate logistics for big and small events. He also wrote the screenplay for the Netflix movie Candy Jar, a story of two highly competitive high school debaters.
He lives with his parents in Weston, has loaned his campaign $50,000, and has raised about $62,000.
Other fine candidates
The other five Democrats in the race are:
Ruth Carter-Lynch, 67, of Lauderhill, a selfemployed consultant and human resources professional. She ran unsuccessfully for the Broward School Board in 2004 and 2012, and Lauderhill City Commission in 2008. She is a former president of Planned Parenthood of South Palm Beach and Broward Counties, and a former leader of diversity initiatives for Vanguard Automotive, the company that owned National Car Rental and Alamo Rent A Car.
Carter-Lynch says she’s been researching the position for six years and has consulted with election supervisors in several large states. She promises to conduct a forensic analysis of the office and create a better workflow.
Mitchell “Mitch” Ceasar, 66, of Plantation, a lawyer, lobbyist and former long-time chairman of the Broward Democratic Party. He ran unsuccessfully for clerk of courts four years ago.
Ceasar has been a fixture in Democratic politics since the 1980s. He has the most endorsements from bigname Democrats and has raised the most money, $162,000.
As the founder of a Democratic club in Tamarac at age 21, he was a Chad Klitzman of an earlier time. But instead of running for office, he became a party leader. He ran the show during the last years of the condo boom — when Broward voter turnout regularly trailed the rest of the state.
He built a lobbying practice representing Broward cities. He’s also been a frequent commentator on RT America, a Russianowned TV channel that U.S. intelligence agencies call a propaganda arm of the
Putin regime. Ceasar would not tell us whether he was paid for his RT America appearances.
Ceasar says he’s the most experienced candidate, an expert on election law and a fighter against voter suppression who promises to be scrupulously nonpartisan. Given his brand as a Democratic Party leader, being nonpartisan would be a dramatic break from his past. The times demand someone else.
Jennifer Gottlieb, 48, of Hollywood, a school board member from 2006-2011 who most recently was legislative aide to Sen. Gary Farmer, D-Lighthouse Point.
Gottlieb resigned from the school board in 2011 as scandal swept over the nation’s sixth-largest school district. A grand jury blasted the system for corruption and mismanagement and singled out a $25 million Beachside Montessori School in Hollywood that she had championed. A related report by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement detailed her romantic entanglements with two bankers who sought bond business with the district. Gottlieb was not charged with any wrongdoing.
“What’s important is that I was never charged. I was never indicted, and I never did anything that violated my fiduciary responsibility as a School Board member,” she said during our joint online candidate interview. “The past is over. It is not where I am now. It is not who I am now.”
Gottlieb said she has not read the grand jury report. We believe in second chances, but found her lack of curiosity about the report deeply unsettling.
Tim Lonergan, 58, faces term limits after eight years on the Oakland Park City Commission, including two years as mayor. A former president of the Broward League of Cities, he said he would like to work full-time in public service. Lonergan says his work in Medicare and Medicaid operations for United HealthCare has prepared him to run an operation with lots of moving parts. “I think we need to evaluate the lessons learned — and opportunities for improvement — from the 2020 elections and move forward from there.”
Joe Scott, 38, of Parkland, is another fine candidate. He’s a West Point graduate and Army combat veteran who received the Bronze Star. He said he left the service in 2009 after five years so as not to miss watching his son grow up. He’s held a number of jobs since. He is currently an accounts manager for Ricoh, a Japanese multinational imaging and electronics company.
“I have extensive training and experience in the coordination and mobilization of individuals toward a collective desired outcome under stressful circumstances in battlegrounds and offices,” Scott wrote in his questionnaire. “I will apply my leadership skills and experience to Elections Office coordination, community outreach efforts, training assessments, and implementation of organizational change.”
Winner takes all
Whoever gets the most votes in this election wins. There is no run-off. The nominee will face Republican Catherine McBreen in November, but because Broward is so Democratic, the top votegetter in this primary is likely to be the next elections supervisor.
The seat is open, with no incumbent, for the first time in 20 years. After the 2018 election, former Gov. Rick Scott removed Brenda Snipes and appointed Republican Pete Antonacci, who promised not to run for election. Scott accused Snipes of fraud during the ballot count, but never proved it. Many believe her flawed ballot design helped Scott win Bill Nelson’s U.S. Senate seat.
Elections are complicated events that carry enormous consequences. They need intense preparation and routine drills.
They need someone who will ask what-if questions and keep looking for ways to improve.
Klitzman is best prepared. He offers generational change at an agency grown creaky and unresponsive to the demographic and technological revolution around it.
For Broward Supervisor of Elections, the Sun Sentinel recommends Chad Klitzman.
Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Dan Sweeney, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.