Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
Effective midnight Thursday, Sept. 30, longtime Elections Supervisor Marty Bishop will be stepping down from office.
Bishop rendered his resignation to Gov. Ron DeSantis in a letter dated July 30, the content of which letter he had Clerk of Court Kirk Reams read to the Jefferson County Commission on Thursday evening, Aug. 19.
“It has been an honor and a pleasure to serve the citizens of Jefferson County as Supervisor of Elections for the past twenty-plus years,” Bishop wrote the governor.
The reasons for his decision, Bishop wrote, had to do with recent family health issues and the continuous changes in Florida election laws that placed supervisors of elections “in precarious situations which only adds additional stress to an already stressful job, and can also contribute to the deterioration of one’s own health.”
Bishop explained in the letter that that the midnight Sept. 30 effective date was chosen to coincide with the county’s start of a new fiscal year on Oct. 1. If, however, the governor chose to appoint a replacement sooner, “I would have no problem retiring earlier,” Bishop wrote.
Contacted by the ECB Publishing on Monday morning, Aug. 23, Bishop affirmed that family medical issues in the last several months had influenced his decision. And no, the health problems were not related to him, he said.
“It comes to a point where I love the job, but family has to come first,” Bishop said.
Asked about the stress of the job, Bishop said that this also had been a factor in his decision.
“It seems that every time that the legislature meets, it changes something about the election laws,” Bishop said, “Then someone sues and the supervisors of elections catch the blunt of it. We have to do all the producing and the documenting. Most supervisors of elections are aggravated with the situation.”
Being the gentleman that he is, however, Bishop declined to expound further on the topic.
First elected to the office in 2000, Bishop has served five uninterrupted term since then almost virtually unchallenged.
Reelected to a sixth term in 2020, he still has three years remaining in his current term. This means that whomever the governor appoints to the office will have to run for the position in 2022. And whoever wins the 2022 election, will then serve the last two years of Bishop’s term.
During his 20-plus years in office, Bishop has had to deal with many of the election law upheavals of recent times, including the implementation of a new voting system, the introduction of the 911 addressing system and the contested 2000 election with its hanging chads and the media frenzy surrounding it.
Then came the mandates for new voting machines in 2002 and again in 2020. More recently, he was involved in moving the election office to a new location amidst a primary and the constrictions imposed by the Coronavirus Pandemic. Which is to say that Bishop has experienced much in the way of election changes during the last 20 years and is ready for a change himself.
His plan, he said, is to relax in what he called his place in the Bishop Woods and attend to things that he has been unable to attend to in recent times because of the many demands on his time.
“I’ve been working my entire life,” Bishop said. “I can now draw my full Social Security benefits and take it easy.”
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