Satcher Shows his True Colors ... Again

Recently anointed Manatee County Supervisor of Elections James Satcher had one job before the upcoming election: prove he could be nonpartisan in an office for which the attribute is an essential prerequisite. Unsurprisingly, the developer shill has failed miserably. 

Satcher was appointed to the position because the development cabal pressured the governor’s office to install one of their underlings as SOE despite the fact that he has zero qualifications and the outgoing Republican supervisor had already recommended his highly qualified Chief of Staff/Deputy SOE, Scott Farrington.

Satcher, who was a Manatee County Commissioner until being appointed, immediately showed his complete lack of ability by hiring a similarly unqualified chief of staff who happened to be the out-of-work husband of one of his county commission allies. A few days later, Satcher asked for a massive budget increase (for the current year’s budget!) and received it despite failing to articulate any sort of reason why he needed nearly a million bucks, perhaps because our county commission is so fiscally conservative that it has yet to find an expensive dumb idea it hasn’t liked enough to green light.

Most recently, Satcher used taxpayer dollars to send out what will surely prove to be a very expensive waste of resources, mailing new voter ID cards to every single voter in the county—all 274,484 of them. Satcher claimed this was a statutory requirement whenever there is a new Supervisor of Elections. It is not, though it remains unclear whether this was another one of his lies or he was just too dumb to understand the language of the statute. Satcher’s well-known dearth of both intelligence and ethics makes it difficult to speculate as to which was the case.

Either way, many voters who had recently switched their party registration and had since been issued new voter IDs were again issued new voter IDs, only this time with incorrect party affiliation, causing unnecessary confusion. What’s more, the manner in which Satcher’s letter was presented (see below) looks and reads more like a campaign mailer than a civic communication.

You see, Satcher’s in trouble because voters are becoming increasingly aware that he’s a two-bit goldbricker who has no business being in charge of anything, let alone something as important as our elections. He’s also made no secret of his opposition to free and fair elections, utilizing the write-in loophole to close off what should have been an open primary.

The Florida Constitution prescribes that any race in which there is no general election challenge is to be an open primary in which all voters get to participate because the primary becomes the de facto election. After all, we're supposed to be a democracy in which each voter gets a say as to who represents them on legislative bodies. The Florida Constitutional Revision Commission put this to a ballot referendum, and it was overwhelmingly passed by voters. 

However, the courts have ruled that a qualified “write-in” candidate who doesn’t have to collect signatures or pay the fee to get on the ballot can nonetheless close off such a race. Republican legislators have refused to close this loophole because it’s been too useful in tipping the scales of elections by freezing out more than half of voters from such races. Yes, it seems ironic that the party that so constantly bloviates about free and fair elections and defending the constitution is so willing to engage in such blatant hypocrisy … wait, no, it doesn’t, as that’s pretty much become the brand.

“Anyone who deliberately waited to change their party at the last minute to rig the primary election, the one not of their party, then that’s on them," Satcher recently told TBT’s Dawn Kitterman when asked to defend the confusion he had caused. Let that soak in, folks. It is perfectly legal for voters to switch party affiliation, and doing so because your elected officials are subverting democracy in an effort to pick their voters rather than have voters pick their elected officials is the best reason to do so that I can think of. The fact that our election supervisor thinks this amounts to rigging his upcoming election is disturbing, to say the least.

If you were worried that Gov. DeSantis caving to developers and appointing a soft-headed toady to such an important office would threaten the integrity of our local elections, James Satcher just showed you that those fears were beyond justified. I sincerely hope enough voters become aware of his profound unfitness for office so that this developer lickspittle gets sent packing next month. 

related:
For Manatee County SOE, TBT Recommends Scott Farrington

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of our weekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County government since 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Click here for his bio. His 2016 short story collection, Casting Shadows, was recently reissued and is available here.