HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. - If you’re one of the nearly 260,000 registered non-party-affiliated voters in Hillsborough County, outside of the school board, there aren’t many interesting races for you to participate in the August 18 primary.

But there is one exception. 

The race that every registered voter in Hillsborough can weigh in on is the clerk of the court race between Democrats Kevin Beckner and Cindy Stuart. The Republicans failed to field a candidate in the race, and there’s no write-in candidate to close it off to non-Democratic party voters.

(Another open primary race is in the Democratic House District 70 race, which encompasses  parts of Manatee, Sarasota, Pinellas and Hillsborough counties).

Hillsborough County Democratic Party strategist Vic DiMaio says with the clerk’s race open to everyone, the campaigns for Stuart and Beckner have to adapt.

“Now you have to appeal to independents, to Republicans, and now your entire strategy changes,” he says.

Open primary elections are rare in Florida politics, because typically there tends to be a write-in candidate who files late before the qualifying deadline, which then “closes” the primary to voters within that particular party.

“That’s a little quirk in the Florida law that everybody b-tches and howls and complains about it, but nobody does anything about, because both parties – both Democratic and Republican – use the write-in candidate loophole in the law to close the primary to just Republicans or just Democrats,” DiMaio says. 

In the case of the clerk’s race, it actually looked to potentially be a dynamic race in November. Veteran Republican state Senator Tom Lee announced at the end of May that he would step down from his seat prematurely, with speculation rampant that he would enter the clerk’s race. He then reversed course about 10 days later and said that he would not run for the seat, leaving Hillsborough Republicans without a candidate to compete with in November.

The seat has been held since 2004 by longtime Hillsborough Democrat Pat Frank.

Voters frequently say they’re not really sure what the clerk of the court does.

Frank responds to that inquiry by saying her office doesn’t issue birth and/or death certificates, but “everything in between in terms of your life, we handle,” she told Spectrum Bay News 9 on Monday. She says the two main functions of the office is to maintain records and handle money.

Frank explained that there are two separate constitutional jobs that the clerk does: 1) comptroller for the county, and 2) clerk of the court, in this case Florida’s 12th Circuit Court (some circuit courts include more than one county, such as Florida’s 6th Judicial Circuit, which encompasses Pinellas and Pasco counties).

Like a number of other “constitutional” offices such as tax collector and property appraiser, the clerk of the court doesn’t appear to be very ideological – yet it’s considered a partisan office.

Two years ago, the then GOP-controlled Hillsborough County Commission voted to hold a referendum on making the races for clerk of the court, property appraiser, tax collector, sheriff and supervisor of elections nonpartisan. The courts later struck that proposal down, saying it was unconstitutional.

Frank, a longtime Democrat who served on the county commission and in the Florida House and Senate, says that ideology actually can play a part in the clerk’s office on occasion – such as when same sex marriage became legal in Florida in 2015. In at least five of the state’s 67 counties, in conservative northern Florida, however, those clerks of the court announced that they would not follow the law, citing their Christian beliefs.

“Well, I’m sorry but, you don’t take your religion into the courtroom in situations like this,” Frank says. “You have to abide by the rule of the law and you do what is expected of you. And fortunately, some of those clerks changed their minds, and some others chose not to run for reelection, and that’s their choice, but certain issues of that sort that are more partisan than others.”

Open primaries are a rare thing in Florida, but voters indicated decades ago that they wanted the option.

In 1998, they adopted a constitutional amendment that said that if all candidates for an office have no opposition in the general election, voters, regardless of party affiliation could vote in the primary elections. But bills to implement the amendment that were introduced in the 1999 legislative session never passed.

“And then of course, the write-in candidates started being put on the ballots to keep the primary closed,” says Steve Hough, the director of Florida Fair & Open Primaries. “And if you recall, that amendment in 1998 passed with something like 63%-64%, when the threshold back then was only 50 percent. (It was 64 percent).So this is something that Florida voters have wanted for a long time,” he says.

Florida Fair & Open Primaries is one of the groups advocating for the support of a constitutional amendment this November which would establish a “top-two” open primary system for primary elections for state legislators, the governor and cabinet in Florida.

During the Constitutional Revision Commission process in 2018, an attempt to place a proposed constitutional amendment to close the write-in loophole failed to garner the votes necessary to advance.

The race between Stuart and Beckner is expected to be extremely competitive. Stuart is serving in her last year on the Hillsborough School District. Beckner served two terms on the Hillsborough County Commission, but lost a bid for the clerk’s job in a Democratic primary against Frank in 2016.

The clerk of the court position pays $171,000 annually.