Jesse Scheckner
Republican Juan Fernandez-Barquin is staying on as Miami-Dade Clerk and Comptroller after county voters chose him over his Democratic challenger and fellow former state lawmaker, Annette Taddeo.
With early and mail-in votes tallied and 170 of 757 precincts reporting Tuesday night, Fernandez-Barquin had 55.5% of the vote to keep the job to which Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed him last year.
For many voters and election observers, the Clerk’s race was hardly the first that came to mind when considering the most heated contests this cycle, but the post at stake was vital.
Miami-Dade’s Clerk is the chief custodian of all county records. In accordance with voters’ wishes from a 2018 referendum, the job will also soon encompass overseeing all county funds, auditing duties and recording responsibilities.
For decades, the position was synonymous with one person: Harvey Ruvin, a widely respected public servant who spent nearly two-thirds of his life in public office, the preponderance of which as Clerk.
A Democrat who prioritized not politicizing his office, Ruvin died on New Year’s Eve 2022. DeSantis tapped Fernandez-Barquin, then in his third House term, to replace Ruvin six months later.
Fernandez-Barquin, 41, largely maintained a low profile since. He stressed that he wanted to continue the “Harvey Ruvin tradition” of not keeping the Clerk’s Office a neutral institution.
But voters hadn’t chosen him, and former Sen. Annette Taddeo, a Democrat, believed they should choose her instead. Independent write-in candidate Rubin Young, 63, also filed to run for the job.
Miami-Dade’s Clerk is responsible for running an office of some 1,100 employees, spread across 16 court facilities, and a $105.6 million annual budget.
Fernandez-Barquin proved he can do the job. Taddeo, 57, said she could do it better.
A lawyer born in Miami to Cuban parents, Fernandez-Barquin started his career as an Assistant Public Defender in Palm Beach County before working on the private side of the legal divide, first with a civil law firm and later in private practice.
He won a race in 2018 to represent House District 119, which spans a western portion of Miami-Dade’s Kendall neighborhood. Voters re-elected him twice.
Taddeo was born in Colombia, where she spent her first 17 years before fleeing to the U.S. after terrorists kidnapped her father. She is the owner and operator of a translation business called LanguageSpeak.
A past Chair of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, Taddeo became Florida’s first Latina Democratic Senator in 2017, when she won a Special Election. She won a full, four-year term the year after but resigned early to mount an unsuccessful congressional bid in 2022.
Since then, she’s been in something of a political limbo. She ran for Chair of the Florida Democratic Party last year, but came up short. About six months later, after DeSantis replaced Ruvin’s preferred successor from the Clerk post, she started mulling a run. She filed in February.
Despite his comparatively short time in appointed office, Fernandez-Barquin had some accomplishments to run on. He extended Clerk office hours and created a mobile unit to increase accessibility, launched a property fraud registration system and established an online payment portal for traffic and court fees.
If elected to a full four-year term, he vowed to make his office and the areas of government it influences more transparent while enhancing its technological abilities with the use of artificial intelligence. He also promised to improve customer service, create a paperless lobbying registration system and simplify payment processes for court, parking and traffic fees.
Those and other “customer-oriented moves” earned Fernandez-Barquin an endorsement from the Miami Herald editorial board, which tempered its nod with criticism about how he has at times seemingly used his public position for political advantage.
The Herald took exception with Fernandez-Barquin’s decision to issue lanyards to employees with his name on it, which the outlet said “feels like an unfair way of boosting name recognition.”
Taddeo’s campaign also accused Fernandez-Barquin in September of using taxpayer money to promote his campaign. At issue was an ad the Clerk’s Office ran about its long-running Operation Green Light program, which helps motorists with suspended licenses regain their driving privileges.
While the ads included no mention of Fernandez-Barquin’s campaign or any call for voter action, they featured a photo of him and were placed prominently on the websites of several local periodicals. Radio ads about the program also mentioned his name.
Taddeo’s team called attention to the fact that Fernandez-Barquin ran the program and marketed it in September, while all other counties run Operation Green Light between April and June. Fernandez-Barquin noted that this was the second year in which Miami-Dade ran Operation Green Light in September. He ran the program in April, as Ruvin did for years, but said a second round was needed to address the sheer number of drivers in the county with suspended licenses.
“This woman is grasping at straws,” he told Florida Politics when asked about the issue, adding that he didn’t believe Taddeo is qualified to serve as Clerk. “She’s not an attorney. She doesn’t know the function of this office and, quite frankly, it’s scary she’s trying to get elected to this position.”
Taddeo fired back in a September interview that of Florida’s 67 counties, 57 have Clerks who are business people like her. She told Florida Politics it’s Fernandez-Barquin, not her, who is unfit for what should be a politically neutral position.
She cited a so-called “anti-riot” bill he successfully sponsored in 2021, which a federal Judge partially blocked later that year. She also pointed to a measure he backed that eroded Miami-Dade’s home rule, including laws solidifying policing powers under the county’s returning Sheriff’s Office and another enabling businesses to halt enforcement of local ordinances through lawsuits. DeSantis backed both measures.
“The last thing that office needs,” she said, “is someone who carried water for the Governor with horrible bills that are detrimental to our county and have been called unconstitutional in our courts.”
Taddeo said that if elected, she would provide taxpayers with a yearly report outlining the county’s finances, make the Clerk’s Office more accessible and transparent, improve staff morale and go beyond programs like Green Light to help residents struggling to make ends meet amid high insurance and housing costs.
Fernandez-Barquin carries a larger war chest than his challenger. Between when he took the Clerk job and Oct. 31, he raised nearly $864,000 between his campaign account and state-level political committee, Floridians United.
After a healthy amount of spending, he had roughly $269,000 left less than a week before Election Day.
Taddeo amassed about $454,000 between her campaign account and county-level political committee, Accountable Miami-Dade. Of that, she had just under $50,000 remaining by November.
Young, who was registered as a Republican, Democrat and with no party affiliation until this year, when he joined the Independent Party of Florida, raised and spent less than $3,700.
A native Miamian and U.S. Army veteran whose resumé includes working as a legislative assistant and guardian ad litem, Young filed to run for Clerk shortly after Ruvin’s death, county records show.
He ran against Ruvin in 2016 and 2020, and in a Republican Primary for Florida’s 25th Congressional District in 2022, scoring 2.6%, 26.8% and 28.4% of the vote, respectively.
