Laurel Lee, Florida’s top election official, resigns with possible run for Congress in her future
Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee is stepping down Monday in a precursor for a likely run for a Tampa Bayarea congressional seat.
Lee submitted a letter of resignation to Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to a Thursday email sent to the state’s county election supervisors by Maria Matthews, director of the state’s Division of Elections.
Matthews said Lee was resigning to pursue “other opportunities,” but she’s considered to be jumping into the race for Congres2004-2006. sional District 15, which takes in Zephyrhills, western Lakeland and part of Lake County as well as northeastern Hillsborough. Lee’s letter to DeSantis gives no reason for the resignation and says nothing about her future plans except, “I look forward to what the future holds.”
Lee is a former assistant U.S. attorney and circuit judge in Hillsborough. She was appointed secretary of state by DeSantis in 2019.
She has strong ties to the area through her husband, former state Sen. Tom Lee, a Republican from Thonotosassa. He comes from a prominent, Brandon-based family and served 18 years in the Florida Senate, where he served as president from
The couple have a young daughter.
She is also close to Attorney General Ashley Moody, who is from Plant City.
DeSantis’ communications director, Taryn Fenske, said in a statement that they were grateful for Laurel Lee’s service to the state and for helping “ensure Florida had an efficient election in 2020, with accurate results.”
Lee didn’t respond to requests for comments.
Since joining the DeSantis administration, she has won bipartisan praise, particularly for the state’s handling of the 2020 election, one of the state’s smoothest in decades.
She has also managed to stay out of the political fray while the state’s elections became a political target for Republicans and supporters of former President Donald Trump after the 2020 election.
Despite the state’s success with that election, DeSantis and the Republican-controlled Legislature have passed changes to the state’s voting laws in the name of rooting out voter fraud.
Nearly all of those changes have led to lawsuits by civil-rights and advocacy groups, which have argued the changes are unconstitutional. Lee, who is responsible for overseeing and implementing those changes with the state’s 67 county election
supervisors, has been a named defendant in many of those lawsuits.
Her tenure was a welcome change for the state’s county election supervisors, though.
“Over the years, the last decade or so, the relationship with the secretary of state and the supervisors had not been as good as what all of us would have liked it to be,” said Marion County Elections Supervisor
Wesley Wilcox, president of the Florida Supervisors of Elections. “She has righted that ship and has been a wonderful partner with us. I wish her nothing but the best. It’s a horrible loss from the secretary of state’s perspective.”
As secretary of state, Lee was also responsible for registering corporations and handing out cultural arts grants.