After Lake County’s most expensive write-in campaign, Carey Baker still lost to Mark Jordan 3-to-1

Carey Baker. Image via Facebook.

Lake County Property Appraiser Carey Baker in 2020 pulled off a move that seemed at once cheap, savvy and successful. He secured re-election to a four-year term without paying a nickel.

But this year, the same trick cost him his job.

Baker for the second consecutive cycle qualified as a write-in candidate to avoid paying a qualifying fee, believing he would not face opposition. But moments after Baker left the building, and minutes before the qualifying period ended, Mark Jordan filed as well, paying the $10,685 fee to qualify as the Republican candidate on the ballot.

Despite Baker executing the most expensive campaign for a write-in candidate in Lake County history, Jordan just won office by more than a 51-percentage-point margin.

Nearly 44,000 Lake County residents voted in the General Election for a write-in candidate for Property Appraiser, and presumably nearly all will eventually count for Baker once officials verify that voters scribbled his name on a dedicated line. But almost 141,000 voted for Jordan, who enjoyed the nearly immeasurable benefit of his name appearing on the ballot literally against a blank space.

Now, Jordan prepares to take office after spending more time in the courtroom defending from lawsuits filed by Baker and allies. Baker, a former state Representative and Senator, now looks at his first days of the 21st century when the Republican does not hold public office. But that may not last forever.

“My political future is bright,” Baker said. “Most folks realized how this would be. My support is still strong and I have a lot of choices. The easiest thing is to just sit out for four years and run again, and as long as my name is on that ballot, I easily can win.”

Of course, anyone reading election returns would see Jordan just unseated an incumbent by a landslide. And he did so with minimal expense. Financial reports through Oct. 31 show Jordan raised a little more than $25,000 over the course of the campaign, while Baker raised nearly $233,000.

“I had a political advantage,” Jordan said. “Why scream and holler?”

Jordan largely kept his head low over the course of the race. He also spent thousands with SimWins, a Tampa-based political consulting firm. But records show his greatest campaign expense was that qualifying fee that set the entire bitter contest off.

To this day, Jordan insists he had no certain knowledge that Baker would choose to qualify as a write-in candidate, but he acknowledges he did know Baker had done so before in 2020. He sat in the Supervisor of Elections’ Office the day of qualifying at the same time as Baker. Both men had paperwork filled out in advance and signed in before a noon deadline, and Jordan said he had no way to know what paperwork Baker would turn in, nor could he change his political strategy after the deadline.

“He (Baker) had the documents in his hand and had a check attached to the top,” Jordan said. Jordan noted his brother, Tax Collector David Jordan, even asked whether Baker would pay the fee this time. “My brother said to him, ‘are you going to do the switcheroo thing?’ And my brother even said, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’”

David Jordan told a similar story in July, shortly after the qualifying date. Baker said both men are not telling the truth about their interactions in the office.

After that, Baker sued the Supervisor of Elections and Mark Jordan, but courts said nothing they did violated the law. The Lake County Republican Executive Committee censured David Jordan and called for Mark Jordan to resign as a candidate.

The irony, Mark Jordan notes, is that a portion of his qualifying fee as a partisan candidate went to the local party. Since Baker paid no fee to qualify as a write-in candidate this year or four years ago, the party got no such windfall from him. But the party expended resources funded in part from Jordan’s own pocket for the party to then attack him and his brother, who also paid a qualifying fee and won office unopposed.

“What would they have done if a Democrat had done this?” he said.

Mark Jordan said defending his actions in court ultimately cost him tens of thousands of dollars. But he said he always had the same right to run for office as any citizen. Other elements played into his decision to run for Property Appraiser, he said, and his decision to stay mum about it until the last day of qualifying.

“Looking at that office, I believed things certainly could be done better,” he said. “Looking at it, I certainly was going to run as a Republican.”

But Jordan felt that if he were to challenge an incumbent, he wanted an open Primary where Democrats and no-party voters could also have a vote. Had he announced earlier in the week, he presumed allies of Baker would, ironically, field a write-in candidate to close the Primary to Republican voters. The write-in loophole has been exploited by candidates of both parties in the state for decades, often by incumbents who only want party faithful to vote.

Jordan also wanted to run a short campaign where Baker didn’t have time to amass a fortune before an Aug. 20 vote.

Ironically, Baker ended up the write-in candidate, but that gave him until the Nov. 5 election to race money and campaign aggressively for the seat. Over the past few months, newly printed signs encouraging voters to “Write In Carey Baker” appeared all over the county, especially leading into Election Day. Before the end of October, he spent more than $151,000 on the race.

But Baker acknowledges he always knew the race would be a long shot. That sunk in especially on Election Day, when he campaigned outside precincts and found little interest in a race so far down-ballot.

“What drove our record turnout was the top of the ticket, the presidential race,” he said. “I talked to people but they were there to support their favored presidential candidate. Everything else was ancillary.”

Indeed, more than 227,000 votes were cast for President in Lake County, including 140,393 of those for Donald Trump alone. Jordan, running with his party designation on the ballot, received 140,828, and fewer than 185,000 voted for Property Appraiser at all.

As Baker filled his own ballot, he also realized for the first time just how much he was asking voters to break from common practice. He’d never voted for a write-in candidate in his life, filling in a bubble and writing the 10 letters of his own name on a line. “It was just different,” he said.

But Baker still felt bolstered that his campaign reached as many people as it did.

“Over 43,000 people in Lake County wrote my name in,” he said. “It warms my heart quite frankly.

He still feels drawn to run, and is inclined to file in 2028 for Property Appraiser.

“People won’t forget what happened,” he said. “It touched them in a personal way. I think, sadly, this will stay fresh in a lot of minds.”

Jordan knows he will face some of that when he takes over as Property Appraiser in a matter of weeks. He wants employees of Baker to know he isn’t gunning to take anyone’s job away.

“This job is really ministerial,” he said. “My background is in emergency services and I have served in a variety of roles. But this is primarily about team building and working together within particular parameters. How the office will run and how we will produce a good product for taxpayers, we have people who are skilled. I hope they appreciate having a fresh breath of new leadership.”

He will seek ways to improve customer service for residents of Lake County, and that will involve assessing operations throughout.

Notably, some of the few contributions raised by Jordan came from companies attached to developer and former U.S. Senate candidate Carlos Beruff, who has pending legal action against Baker’s Office over assessments on local properties.

“You inherit whatever business is left from your predecessor,” Jordan said. “I will consider it with legal counsel and seek any way forward toward a resolution. That’s the goal. But I’m not making any assumptions with the case.”