Too few voters spoke for too many Tuesday | Editorial

When people don’t bother to vote, democracy suffers.

When politicians conspire to make it especially difficult to vote by mail, democracy suffers even more. That’s an obvious takeaway from Tuesday’s municipal elections in Palm Beach and Broward counties.

In Palm Beach, where 17 cities from Atlantis to Tequesta cling to an outdated March election timetable, turnout was 12.6%, compared to 18.4% just two years ago. It’s a bad sign, but it’s why Tallahassee decided last year to force voters to make new vote-by-mail requests every election cycle. Sadly, voter suppression works.

All standing requests for vote-by-mail ballots expired on Dec. 31, and too many voters didn’t request mail ballots for a municipal elections that historically attract paltry turnouts. As a result, the few spoke for the many on Tuesday.

In Delray Beach, where the city’s grace and beauty have been tarnished by mean-spirited politics, voters replaced Commissioner Juli Casale with Rob Long, and Angela Burns defeated Angie Gray to win an open seat.

Long’s unofficial 377-vote victory over Casale shows that voters either weren’t troubled or didn’t know about his paid work for developers, some of it shielded by secrecy agreements, while he also cast votes on projects as a city zoning board member.

Casale, a supporter of limited growth and a fiscal watchdog, took her work very seriously, but she was perceived as an ally of Mayor Shelly Petrolia, a polarizing figure, and tensions at City Hall over Old School Square and other issues took their toll.

Rob Long, with supporter Debra Tendrich, celebrating on Tuesday night. (Facebook)

Casale knocked on thousands of doors, but her loss suggests that Long did a superior job messaging to a tiny cluster of voters. That is his specialty, as owner of a civic engagement firm. In the closing days, Long even sounded like Casale, railing about traffic and “overdevelopment” on his campaign Facebook page.

The political upheaval in Delray Beach has only just begun. Petrolia and two commissioners are term-limited next year, ensuring a new majority at City Hall just one year from now.

Elsewhere, Boynton Beach voters chose Mack McCray and Aimee Kelley at City Hall and voters in Boca Raton rejected Mayor Scott Singer’s proposal to lengthen terms of city officeholders from three to four years.

It’s never easy for a first-time candidate to make an impact in a Broward election where loyalty often runs deep, but it happened Tuesday.

Newcomer Jeffrey Wasserman, 34, an assistant principal at Cypress Bay High School, narrowly won a seat on the Coconut Creek City Commission, defeating Becky Tooley, a deeply entrenched incumbent who had served for 20 years. In another commission race, appointee John Brodie benefited from having two challengers, Alfred Delgado and Nancy Fry. Brodie won with 40% of the vote.

Wasserman won by only 50 votes, which doesn’t sound like much, but in a county with an embarrassingly low 7% turnout, that was more than enough. He may be the youngest commissioner in city history and his goals include school safety, improved law enforcement and preventing expansion of a monstrous county landfill.

An example of a reply Coconut Creek candidate Jeffrey Wasserman received to his handwritten postcards to voters. (Wasserman campaign)

Despite the extreme level of voter apathy, it’s refreshing to see city candidates winning the old-fashioned way, relying less on special interest money and more by making personal contact with voters.

Wasserman sent handwritten postcards to about 1,800 Creek voters asking them to vote for him. That’s direct mail the hard way. His final unofficial vote total: 1,864.

Wasserman, born and raised in Coral Springs, could easily pass for a grandson of a retiree at Wynmoor, the upscale retirement community that drew far more voters than any other city precinct. He immediately becomes one of the fresh new faces on an often-stale Broward political scene.

Tooley, a 74-year-old widow, has devoted decades to the city she loves, but Wasserman’s victory shows how quickly “the Creek” is turning younger.

Outside the Wynmoor clubhouse on Tuesday, Wasserman waved a sign as voters trickled in, one by one. “The advertising for this election was poor,” he told the Sun Sentinel. “We candidates are the ones who got the word out.”

Elsewhere in Broward, Miramar Mayor Wayne Messam cruised to a third term. Two Deerfield Beach leaders, Michael Hudak and Ben Preston won re-election, and voters approved the sale of a tract near I-95 for a mixed-use development project.

Every city that holds municipal elections in March should consider moving them to November. The rock-bottom turnout should also send a message to Tallahassee to rectify its mistake and make it easier for voters to obtain mail ballots.

For the record, three area legislators voted for SB 524 last year and made it harder for their constituents to vote by mail: Reps. Mike Caruso, R-Delray Beach; Chip LaMarca, R-Lighthouse Point; and Rick Roth, R-West Palm Beach.

Can it get worse? Yes. Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Department of State, in a report to the Legislature presented on Feb. 1 which can be read online at the Department of State website (see page 26 of the report), is proposing to eliminate a provision that allows voters to request mail ballots by phone.

The requests would have to be made in writing or in person. County election supervisors oppose this latest suppression tactic and are quietly working to defeat it.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at [email protected].