Several candidates say the Orange County elections office run by interim supervisor Glen Gilzean kept them in the dark about petitions that would allow them to qualify to run without paying a filing fee.

The candidates say the office didn’t inform them how many of their signatures were valid until well past the submission deadline. A candidate can file for free using a petition or pay a fee that can run into the thousands of dollars. The elections office is required to certify the signatures as valid.

Their experiences have raised concerns about Gilzean, appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in March after longtime supervisor Bill Cowles retired.

“There’s so many moving pieces, you’re trying to collect petitions, you’re trying to do meet-and-greets,” said Kelly Semrad, a registered Democrat and candidate for the nonpartisan Orange County Commission. “And you kind of depend on the supervisor of elections. … I just felt like there was a lack of information in the process. And that lack of information causes a lot of uncertainty.”

Gilzean did not respond to requests for an interview. At his swearing-in ceremony on May 24, he pledged to be “transparent, fair, and accessible.”

Federal, judicial and state attorney candidates had a deadline of March 25 to submit the signatures needed to qualify for the ballot.

Seth Hyman, an Orlando attorney and former prosecutor running as a Republican in the race for Orange-Osceola state attorney, said he didn’t gather enough of the 11,252 signatures he needed, so he paid the $12,753 fee.

But he said the last 316 verified signatures he did submit to the Orange elections office failed to be uploaded to the state Division of Elections website in time. The office had a state-mandated deadline of April 15 to certify signatures.

“I was diligently looking at the Division of Elections website … and the last three batches of petitions I turned in weren’t showing up,” Hyman said. “So I kept going in there every week, asking them, ‘What’s going on?’ I wasn’t really getting an answer.”

He said he was eventually told by an employee that the office had failed to upload them in time.

“The Supervisor of Elections office explicitly said that they told me they missed the deadline,” he said. “[The state] basically closed the door on the Orange County Supervisor of Elections. I asked them to do anything they could, and it still hasn’t been remedied. And I don’t know if it ever will.”

Hyman said that while the signatures ultimately did not matter for him, such a delay could mean all the difference for candidates in other races.

“If the same thing happens to other people that are close to their threshold … and they may not have the money, it’s a problem,” he said.

‘Difficult not to be concerned’

For state legislative candidates and county offices, the petition filing deadline was May 13, with a final qualifying deadline of June 14.

Caitlin Germaine, support service manager for the Osceola elections office, said her office’s policy is to continually communicate with candidates. “We will notify the candidate of the outcome of [a] specific batch, plus the overall total of valid petitions,” Germaine said. “So they kind of know how they’re doing as they go.”

Nate Douglas, a Democrat running for state House District 37 in Orange and Seminole counties, said as of Thursday he still didn’t know how many of his submitted signatures were verified by the Orange office.

Douglas said his campaign had fallen short of the required 1,049 signatures by about 100, so he’ll pay the $1,781 qualifying fee for that post.

But “right now, we don’t know what our rejection rate is,” Douglas said. “We haven’t gotten any updates.”

Douglas said the lack of transparency in the Orange office “is quite frightening for candidates.”

“It’s very difficult not to be concerned, especially considering that this is someone who was appointed by Gov. DeSantis,” Douglas said of Gilzean. “… We just want to make sure that those petitions will be counted in a timely manner. And that hasn’t been happening so far since he took office.”

In her county commission race, Semrad qualified to run after 1,652 of the 2,000 signatures she submitted to the elections office were verified, which she still considered a “relatively high rejection rate.” She needed 1,451 to get on the ballot.

But she said she didn’t hear anything for weeks and could only see her petition status when she showed up at the elections office. She learned she qualified after getting a letter on Wednesday postmarked May 25.

If it turned out she didn’t meet the signature requirements, “I would have been in total panic mode,” she said. Her qualifying fee would have been nearly $3,700, “and that would have been a lot of money to raise in a relatively short amount of time, particularly when you’re doing a grassroots-style campaign.”

A candidate does a test

Wes Hodge, the former Orange County Democratic chair and a candidate for elections supervisor, said he always planned to pay the $11,605 fee but submitted 200 signatures on March 10 as a test.

He said he only received an official notification that 182 were verified more than two months later on May 25, the same day as Semrad’s letter, with “radio silence” from the Orange office in between.

Hodge acknowledged there has been “disruption” in the office, with some employees leaving upon Gilzean’s appointment and new ones being hired.

“But you would think the processes were already there,” Hodge said. “I don’t know why they weren’t adhered to under Gilzean.”

Gilzean, a Republican, was appointed on March 4 but has not indicated if he’ll run this year for a full term. Including Hodge, there were four Democrats and an independent who had filed to run, but so far no Republican.

Candidates have up until the last minute to file paperwork and pay the qualification fee, which allows for some strategic moves.

In April, former GOP Florida Senate President Mike Haridopolos filed to run for Congress in District 8 based largely in Brevard County just minutes before the noon deadline, after which incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Bill Posey, who had also qualified, immediately dropped out and endorsed him.

Gilzean is scheduled to appear at a June 12 League of Women Voters of Orange County forum of supervisor candidates “to talk about elections issues,” according to a league statement.