Collier County Supervisor of Elections Melissa Blazier. (Photo: Author)
July 3, 2023 by David Silverberg
This morning Melissa Blazier filed the paperwork to run for Collier County Supervisor of Elections in 2024.
Blazier is already serving as Collier County’s Supervisor. She was appointed to the position by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on May 19. This followed the retirement of her predecessor, Jennifer Edwards, who held the position for 22 years.
Until now, the position of county Supervisor of Elections position was a relatively non-controversial post, with straightforward duties, requirements and results, both in Collier County and around the country. But since the 2020 election, election supervisors have come under unprecedented scrutiny. Never has the clean and accurate counting of votes been more subject to challenge—or been more important.
Blazier has been working in the Elections Office for the past 17-and-a-half years and knows every aspect of election management. She was certified as an Elections/Registration Administrator by the National Association of Election Officials’ Election Center and is a Master Florida Certified Elections Professional through the Florida Supervisors of Elections.
Educationally, she has a magna cum laude Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Hodges University. In 2010 she graduated from the Associate Leadership Collier program spring class of 2010, the 2014 Leadership Collier class and the Leadership Marco class of 2019.
She’s active in a wide variety of civic and political groups including Kiwanis, where she’s president of the Naples chapter, the American Legion Auxiliary and the League of Women Voters. She’s a member of the Naples Republican Club, Republican Women of Southwest Florida Federated, and the Women’s Republican Club.
How does Blazier see her job and the challenges ahead? We sat down with her last Wednesday, June 28, for an interview. What follows is a verbatim question and answer transcript. Brackets [ ] denote summations or editor’s clarifications.
Q: What assurance can you give Collier County voters that we will have fair, accurately tabulated elections in the future, free of any interference or problems?
A: As you know, I was trained by the best, so for over 17 years I worked under Jennifer [Edwards] and I have no plans in changing the way that we conduct elections in Collier County, any of our voter registration, voter outreach, elections. Our goal is just to improve. How can we do things better?
Q: You are going to be up for election yourself in the August [20, 2024] Republican primary and then, of course, in the general [election]. How do you deal with counting the votes for your own election? What’s the process? Is there a recusal, or what happens?
A: It’s something that we’re going to have work through as we get closer to that primary. So, if the Supervisor of Elections is contested on the ballot then he or she can no longer serve on the Canvassing Board for that specific election.
What I will be able to do is serve on the Canvassing Board in an advisory capacity. I can be there to provide information, laws, updates, stuff like that. But I cannot vote on acceptance or rejection of any of the ballots that are brought to the Board. That’s something they will do on their own without my input.
Now, they can ask me questions and I can give feedback on the law and processes but not any kind of an opinion.
Q: And the Canvassing Board consists of?
A: It should consist of a county judge, the chair of the Board of County Commissioners and the Supervisor of Elections.
Now, there are different reasons in statute on why… . Let’s say, a county commissioner would not be able to serve on the Board if they’re actively participating in an election by endorsing. They can actually donate money to a campaign but by actively and verbally endorsing a candidate then they can no longer serve on the Canvassing Board. The same goes for the judge. The Supervisor of Elections positions don’t endorse.
Q: So, under this circumstance it would be a two-person Board?
A: What would happen then is that the chief judge would actually appoint someone to fill in the Supervisor of Elections role and that could potentially be another judge, it could be a county commissioner or it can be a member of the public.
So, for the City of Naples, for example, during their municipal elections, we don’t hold them in conjunction with the presidential preference primary. They typically have their mayor, their city clerk serves and then the City Council appoints one member of the public to serve on their Canvassing Board.
Q: And your primary doesn’t coincide with the Presidential Preference Primary, which is March 19. Yours is in August.
A: Right, so for the March election we’re good with me serving on the Canvassing Board. Once we get to August…and then, assuming that this race goes past August and goes on to the general [election in November] I won’t be able to serve on either of them.
Q: What improvements do you have in mind and are there any you can implement now, while you’re Supervisor, before the election?
A: Some of the things that we’ve already done we started when Jennifer was still here, but we’ve implemented a public records software. Really, I think [the software is] better for the requestor but it’s a lot better for the office in management of public records requests.
As you can imagine, our public records requests, the volume has increased dramatically over the past few years, so it turns into kind of a tracking nightmare for staff. You know: who’s working on what request? What information has been released? Where do we stand on certain requests?
So the software actually tracks the records requests as they’re incoming: who can be assigned to them, what responses? If an invoice needs to be sent, has it been paid, has the check been cashed, when can we close? And then, one of I think the best parts of it is that once a public records request has hit 12 months old, it can be archived so that we don’t keep a public records request as a public record for infinity.
So that’s a nice tool. We’re also going to launch TextMyGov [a texting service allowing voters to opt in to receive election alerts. It also has a keyword software technology allowing a user to type in a question and receive a quick answer. If an answer is not readily available, a staff member can text back. The technology is expected to be in use before the end of the year].
These are things that don’t seem hugely significant. To us they are but we can make these small changes as we go into 2024.
We typically try not to make huge changes in presidential election years. Voting is already confusing enough for people that we don’t want to give them additional things that they have to learn or do in a presidential year when we see the highest turnout. So, typically, if we would have implemented something big it would have been in 2022. But internal things, tools like this that helps the voters but also helps staff, those are things that we’ll try to get done before we get to March.
Q: Have certain kinds of public record requests shown up more than others? Are you getting a lot of challenges to results or anything like that?
A: Not necessarily challenges, but requests for pretty much any report we could possibly pull out of our election management software as well as our voter registration database.
So, people want full registration rolls, they want to know voter history for all of our voters, when we removed certain voters, we’ve updated their addresses, changed party affiliation.
Q: And this is private citizens making these requests or are these parties?
A: Mostly parties and different advocacy groups. It’s been a lot since 2020.
Q: Yes, I would expect. Now, speaking of the challenges: you haven’t had any challenges to the results of the 2022 elections so far, that I’ve heard of?
A: No.
Q: When I was here the last time, Alfie Oakes [Francis Alfred “Alfie” Oakes III, the farmer, grocer, conservative activist and Republican committeeman] was challenging the notion of electronic voting—he was at least the most outspoken person in favor of paper ballots. Jennifer said, “It’s not legal, it’s not the law.” Now that you’re supervisor, do you have a response to that?
A: The state of Florida is all paper. We all use paper ballots. His contention is with the scanners actually tabulating the results of those paper ballots. I believe that they would like us to—and it’s not just him, it’s the CCREC [the Collier County Republican Executive Committee]. They passed a resolution to hand count all ballots, I think it said, for all elections.
The impression I get is that they’re most interested in the top races on the ballot and not the others but I believe the resolution was shared with our legislative delegation and there it stays.
Q: Because making that change would have to be done at the state level?
A: Yes. It would have to be changed in law. That’s not something we can decide to do. And certainly not, given the deadlines we have to certify an election, it’s not possible to hand count—and I’m talking about one race. When you think about the general election ballot, we have over 30 contests on that ballot, with over a hundred different ballot styles that we would potentially have to hand count. I know that no one likes to hear this, but machines are more accurate than human beings are.
Q: Given the challenges—I don’t have to recount what happened in 2020—are you having any difficulty getting staff and volunteers for the 2024 election? Are you recruiting now? What’s the status?
A: We’re always recruiting election workers. The most difficulty we’ll have will be during the primary when almost half of our population in Collier Country goes north somewhere. So we always struggle to find workers in August. We typically don’t in March and November. We won’t use as many workers in March as we will in November but I think it’s a struggle in every county across the nation, really, to find election workers.
Q: Is there anything that you’re doing that’s new and different that’s unique to Collier County?
A: Right now, no.
Q: Are there any changes from past presidential elections that you’ll be implementing this year for the presidential election in ’24?
A: Voting-wise, for early voting we implemented two additional early voting locations in 2022. We didn’t do that in 2022 because we needed them for the 2022 general election but because we knew we were going to need them for the 2024 general election.
So, we’ve got 11 early voting locations instead of 9 now. Then, in the next couple of months, staff, we’re all working together for re-evaluating our precincts. Because we know that we’re going to have to change some boundaries. Growth is huge in [county] District 1 and in District 5. Some areas in District 3, now that the Board and the School Board agreed on pushing the District 3 boundaries out into the Golden Gate estates, we’re going to have to break some of those [precincts] up.
But we do that every odd-numbered year. We look at them and think: “Alright, if we’ve got 8,000 registered voters in one precinct and—Heaven forbid! —they all actually showed up on Election Day, this specific church isn’t going to be able to handle all of these people. So how can we break it up, what other locations can we use?” We lost two locations in 2022 because of the hurricane, that had water damage, so we should be able to move back into those locations for 2024.
But then, we have another couple of locations that have reached out and said, “Hey, we don’t want you to come back.” So we’ve got to find some new space. That happens every year with new leadership in different facilities.
So we always see some changes there. Some people really like to have elections on Election Day in their locations, some don’t. That’s OK, I understand. I mean, it’s not like we pay a thousand dollars to staff some place for a day. It’s $200. So, it’s not like these places are getting rich by letting us use their building for an entire day.
Q: You set the precincts, correct?
A: Yes. We identify the actual polling locations, we draw the precinct boundaries, but then, if a precinct boundary changes, we have to submit it to the Board of County Commissioners through an executive summary. It’s typically something that goes on consent agenda and really, what we’ll do for this one is some clean-up. But it all has to be finalized by them.
Q: Do you think you have things well in hand at this point?
A: Yes. There’s nothing—really, I just moved offices. I moved myself down the hall. I moved my lunch table down two doors. I’ve been in the office for a million years and, trust me, Jennifer and I talk every day. So, between text and e-mail and phone calls, I don’t think we’ve missed a beat there.
Nothing else has really changed. We’re going to go through a little bit of reorganization staff-wise in the office because, obviously, I moved out of my position, I moved someone else into my old position, so I’ve got to fill his old position so we’re going to kind of shake it up a little bit. And we need to do cross training with staff in the office so we’re going to work on that over the next six months going into 2024.
But the election side of it? The election side, we’ve got under control.
Now, is it going to be different not having a Supervisor of Elections actually not on the Canvassing Board for a primary? Yes, that’s going to be different. As long as I’ve been here, Jennifer never had opposition. So, it’s just something new and at the end of it we’re going to be able to check off the list and say, “Done that,” and hopefully we won’t have to do it again. It’s something that we’ll work through.
I think people aren’t going to see a change in what we’ve been doing. We conduct excellent elections and there should be no change to that.
Q: Subjectively, how does it feel to step into the shoes of someone who held the position 22 years before you?
A: It’s a little nerve-wracking. She said that as she was leaving. She said, “Just remember, it’s going to feel different because your name is on the door now,” and it definitely does. It makes you put on a different hat, you think about things differently from a staff perspective, to: “OK, my name is on the door now.”
So it’s a little nerve-wracking, a little more intimidating but I’ve been here long enough that I’ve seen 17-and-a-half years of changes. We’ve gone through multiple types of voting equipment, software changes, and all that since I’ve been with the office. That part of it I can handle pretty well. It’s the other stuff; you definitely think a little differently when your name’s all over the place.
Q: Tell me about your opposition.
A: There’s already someone who has filed to run for Supervisor of Elections. His name is Tim Guerrette. He filed back in March. He filed even before Jennifer announced that she was going to retire.
So, I have not filed yet. I do plan on filing soon. But I have not yet. At this point there is no rush for me to file.
Q: How are you going to handle gearing up a campaign, with all your duties in the office?
A: Yes, it would be nice if I didn’t have to have a full-time job during that, but I do. I did so much stuff before and after work; speaking to different groups and going to different functions so I don’t think a lot of that will change for me. It’s just going to be different when I’m wearing an office hat and when I’m wearing a campaign hat.
Q: Is there a point where you actually start a formal campaign or are you restricted from doing that?
A: You can start whenever you want. And quite honestly, I plan on filing next week. Because, why not? Because I can.
Q: Oh, because I was planning on posting this on Monday morning.
A: That day, Monday morning, July 3rd. The first Monday of the month, so I figured we would do it then, just to get organized over the summer.
Q: Are you anticipating a tough fight?
A: Yes.
Q: I assume you’re running as a Republican?
A: Yes, I am. And he is also a registered Republican. There’s going to be a primary and we’ll see if anyone else jumps into the race and whether there’ll be a general or not.
Q: The only primary is the August one, correct?
A: If there are two Republicans and no one jumps in the race it would be a universal primary, which means that all registered voters in August will be able to vote in this contest. Then it would be said and done in August.
If somebody else jumps into the race, which obviously there’s plenty of time for that, the filing deadline isn’t until June of next year, there could be 15 people in this race by June. Who knows? The more the merrier.
Q: I’m glad you look at it that way! That’ll make for a very interesting contest here in Collier County. Do you have any sense how much this is being replicated around the state and even the nation in terms of contested supervisors of elections?
A: A lot. Several other offices across the state already have that existing supervisor of elections has opposition.
And, we’ll see what happens when we come up to qualifying, how many more are going to retire. A lot have already announced that they have no intention of running again. I think it was just this week, in Politico, that Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections, initially she was planning on running and now she’s saying, no, she’s not going to run. I know the Orange County Supervisor of Elections has said he’s not planning on running. There’s a handful more, so you’ll see a big shift across the state.
Q: On a personal note, what got you interested in elections? What drove your interest in this?
A: My parents own Kelly’s Fish House, right across from Tin City. So I was there, and my son was 3 months old, it is his 24th birthday today, by the way. So my son’s 3 months old, my husband’s in trim carpentry, construction-type stuff. So he was working days, I was working part time at an oil company, Kunz Oil Company, doing accounting work for them and then I picked up a few evening shifts at my parents’ restaurant.
So I met this very nice couple, and became friends with them and he at that time was the chief deputy in the Supervisor of Elections office. And so a position became available, I had been friends with them for several years, for about seven years, and Jennifer’s executive assistant position opened up and he said, “I think you should apply for it.”
I said, “OK, now, my son’s old enough now, he’s in school now, so I don’t have to work nights any more,” I was pretty much working two jobs and I thought, “You know, I could work for the county. A government job? Everyone talks about the great health insurance. Why not?”
So I applied and interviewed with Jennifer and she gave me the job [in 2006] and 17-and-a-half years later, here I am. I never thought in a million years that in 17-and-a-half years I would be sitting where I am. That was definitely never my intention back then.
Melissa Blazier files the paperwork for her candidacy with David Carpenter, the county’s qualifying officer. (Photo: Supervisor’s Office)
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© 2023 by David Silverberg
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