Will Miami’s election be in 2025 or 2026? Judge promises decision ‘very quickly’
A judge will soon weigh in on whether the city of Miami had the legal authority to postpone its election to 2026 without voter approval.
On Wednesday, Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Valerie Manno Schurr heard arguments in a lawsuit filed by Emilio González, a candidate for mayor, who filed suit after the Miami City Commission passed an ordinance that postponed the upcoming November 2025 election to November 2026 without voter approval, giving the current elected officials an extra year in office.
González, a former city manager, is asking the court to find the city’s ordinance “unlawful and invalid,” effectively reverting the election date back to 2025.
READ MORE: It’s official — Miami cancels November election, postpones it to 2026
The parties are on a tight timeline. The original election date is in just over 100 days. Factoring in the deadlines for candidate qualifying, the parties said the entire legal process, including appeals, must be complete by Aug. 8.
“People deserve to know whether there will be an election in this year for mayor and certain City Commission seats, or next year,” assistant city attorney Eric Eves said at Wednesday’s hearing. “Everybody deserves to know and answer that question quickly.”
Eves argued that Florida statute allows municipalities to move their elections from odd to even years via a City Commission vote.
He leaned heavily on a case in the city of North Miami, which similarly moved its elections to even years via a City Council vote and without voter approval a few years ago. That case went up to the Third District Court of Appeal, which upheld a lower court’s ruling that the city acted lawfully.
Eves told the judge that the North Miami ruling “is all the court needs to see” to make a determination in this case.
“There’s no need to reinvent the wheel,” Eves said.
But González’s attorney countered that the city’s ordinance violates not only the city charter but also the county charter and the Florida Constitution.
“The city has always had the option of putting this on the ballot, as the Dade County charter says ... and putting it up for a vote of the electorate as to whether they’d like to change the charter, to move the dates of election and change the terms of office to accomplish that,” said attorney Alan Lawson.
But instead of doing that, Lawson said: “They canceled the election when folks were already running for these offices.”
Indeed, several high-profile candidates had already filed to run for office by the time the city postponed the election, including Miami-Dade County Commissioner Eileen Higgins and former City Commissioner Frank Carollo, the younger brother of current District 3 Commissioner Joe Carollo.
Both Joe Carollo and Mayor Francis Suarez are termed out of office later this year but will get an additional year in office if the City Commission’s decision to move the election to 2026 stands. Suarez has been a supporter of the election date change, lobbying for it behind the scenes and signing the ordinance into law the same day that the commission passed it.
Carollo, on the other hand, has been a staunch opponent to the change. Earlier this week, he filed an amicus brief with the court in support of González’s case.
“The one thing that separates us from every other place in the world — whether you sit on the right or the left, however you vote — is we have and live in and believe in a democracy,” Richard Diaz, an attorney for Carollo, said at Wednesday’s hearing. “And that democracy mitigates in favor of allowing the will of the people to decide such an important decision or issue, which is: Who is going to govern me for the next year if I’m a resident of the city of Miami?”
The issue makes strange bedfellows of González and Carollo, who are political adversaries. González told the Miami Herald he had “zero” involvement in Carollo’s decision to file an amicus brief.
At the end of Wednesday’s hearing, the parties agreed to provide proposed orders to Judge Manno Schurr by Thursday.
“Time is of the essence,” Manno Schurr said. “So you’ll hear from me very quickly.”
Another candidate sues
Meanwhile, Denise Galvez Turros, who has filed to run to succeed Carollo in District 3, filed a lawsuit of her own this week against the city and Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor Alina Garcia.
Galvez Turros argued that the city’s ordinance postponing the election violated the Miami-Dade County Home Rule Charter, as well as a provision of the Florida Constitution that limits positions of elected office to four years.
“This unlawful act is not merely a procedural defect,” Galvez Turros’ legal team argued. “It is a calculated effort by a narrow majority of the Commission to entrench themselves in power, override the will of the electorate, and circumvent the very Charter provisions they are sworn to uphold. The people of Miami are entitled to choose their representatives at the ballot box; not have them imposed by ordinance.”
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