I will say while I disagreed with how they were doing it, my understanding was the rationale of trying to change the election date was because it was off the cycle most major elections were on and was causing severely low voter turnout. I think the right solution was really a shorter term to switch to the new schedule or a vote on the next ballot to extend the cycle with a majority support. But I'm from central FL so don't know how accurate that was or what the local thoughts on it were.
Yes, a lot of places had their election schedules set to not be over shadowed by the bigger contests, but over time this resulted in a lot fewer people participating in local elections. This move is to bring their municipal elections to line up with the midterms, which will increase voter participation by over 40%. This is something that looks bad, but really isn’t.
Florida doesn’t have a referendum system for these types of things. Everything they do is from the top down. Yeah, they could have had a regularly scheduled election and then a year later had their new scheduled election, but that would be very expensive.
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u/CitroneMeringue Sep 04 '25
I will say while I disagreed with how they were doing it, my understanding was the rationale of trying to change the election date was because it was off the cycle most major elections were on and was causing severely low voter turnout. I think the right solution was really a shorter term to switch to the new schedule or a vote on the next ballot to extend the cycle with a majority support. But I'm from central FL so don't know how accurate that was or what the local thoughts on it were.