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Last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed two Orange County Court judges to the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court. In the process, two 2026 elections for county court judges were effectively cancelled.
The governor will appoint the judges to the county bench instead.
Florida’s Constitution states that a judicial nominating commission has 30 days to submit nominations to the governor to fill court vacancies. The governor then has 60 days to make his appointments.
DeSantis chose County Judges Andrew Bain and Mark A. Skipper to fill two vacancies that had opened up on the Ninth Circuit Court with the resignations of Judges Elizabeth J. Gibson and Robert J. Egan.
Bain and Skipper had both been appointed by DeSantis to the Orange County Court and were running for re-election — Skipper in Group 19 against Attorney Chelsea Simmons; Bain in Group 22 against attorney and former public defender Joy Goodyear. (Goodyear has since filed to run against County Judge Cherish Adams in Group 17.)
But the timing of the April 16 appointments — just four days before the candidate qualifying period began on April 20 — is what triggered the cancellation of the two county court elections. In promoting two county judges to fill vacancies on the Ninth Circuit Court, DeSantis created two vacancies on the county court. According to the Florida Constitution, when vacancies occur before the start of an election qualifying period, the governor is then “required” to fill those vacancies — no matter how close to the qualifying start date they occur. The Group 19 and Group 22 elections, in the words of one court watcher, now “cease to exist.”
The two elections have been postponed until 2028, according to the Orange County Supervisor of Elections site.
Goodyear, who filed to run earlier this month, has done no fundraising to date, according to her campaign finance reports. But Simmons, who filed her intent to run in October, had amassed nearly $75,000 in campaign contributions, out-raising her opponent by $15,000.
Simmons declined to comment. VoxPopuli was unsuccessful in reaching Goodyear, Bain and Skipper.
“It does seem unseemly that they can remove races off the ballot,” Brad Ashwell, Florida state director for All Voting Is Local, told VoxPopuli in a Thursday phone interview. “It’s just another instance of somebody gaming the system."
“It often thwarts the idea of voters getting to select their local judges at the county and circuit level, and it can actually thwart it for multiple years,” Aubrey Jewett, PhD, political science professor at University of Central Florida, told VoxPopuli in a phone interview on Wednesday.
Jewett notes that appointees must serve for a year before they stand for election, so appointed judges could be on the bench for a few years before the next election rolls around. Skipper had been on the Orange County Court since February 2024; Bain was appointed in April 2025.
“If he had chosen somebody else so that it didn't impact the county race, the county voters would have gotten to have their say,” Jewett said.
This judicial resignation-gubernatorial appointment two-step is not unusual, said Jewett, who added that jurists have been debating the timing of when governors should fill court vacancies for the last 25 years — particularly because the practice is ripe for abuse.
“If you were really doing a gamesmanship … after [an appointee] had been in office for like two and a half years, you could elevate them to the circuit court,” he said. “Then you produce another vacancy and then you get to a point that … it could be many, many years for some seats before residents actually got the vote. So that's the sort of the crazy thing, but that's the way the constitution is set up.”
Last week, there were reports in at least three other counties — Brevard, Leon and Palm Beach — that 2026 court elections were being canceled as resignations and retirements of circuit court judges, right before the qualifying period, created vacancies that mandate gubernatorial appointments.
“DeSantis did not invent this system, but he is certainly taking advantage of it,” Jewett said in a follow-up email. “This is particularly the case in some of FL’s (sic) more urban areas that are more Democratic and might elect a different type of judge then (sic) he is appointing — even though the judicial races are non-partisan officially.”
DeSantis has been candid about his intention to push Florida’s judiciary to the right, telling an audience at an Arizona University Center for American Institutions event that as a result of his appointments, the Florida Supreme Court has gone from being “one of the most liberal supreme courts in the country when I got in,” to “the most conservative supreme court in the country.”
“It does seem like it’s a pattern or a tendency of DeSantis to make sure he maximizes his impact on the courts,” said Ashwell. “It would be better for democracy and better for voters if they were to have the opportunity to vote for the candidates they choose.”
Kathryn Brudzinski contributed reporting to this article.
