2026 Midterm Elections Voter Guide (Part 1: Federal & State-Wide)

Posted on October 24, 2026 by Michael Froomkin

Early voting has started, and election day is not far off, so here are some thoughts, in the first of three (!) parts, on the upcoming election. But some of them are not long.

Part 1: Federal and State non-judicial offices and state referendums
Part 2: Judicial elections and judicial retention elections (coming soon)
Part 3: Coral Gables Commission & Miami-Dade County referendums (coming soon)

A key feature of so much of the federal and state executive elections is the long shadow of the two men who are not on the ballot: Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. It would not be wrong to see some of these elections as really being about them, and you probably have opinions on them, so in most cases below – other than the State AG election which is something special – I will be quite brief on the theory that I’m not likely to sway many people reading this.

Federal Offices

US Senator

Republican Ashley Moody was appointed to the seat by Ron DeSantis. Once in office she’s been a virtual non-entity, and has reliably voted the Trump line. Her campaign so far consists mostly of hiding from the public to avoid having to defend her record, part of which is being one of the people who signed off on the $10 million “misappropriation” of public money for DeSantis’s political purposes, now known as the Hope Florida scandal, while she was Florida’s Attorney General. I’m sure that endeared her to DeSantis, and didn’t hurt her chances of being appointed to replace Marco Rubio in the Senate.

Democrat Angie Nixon is a real populist. Unlike Moody, she’s a what-you-see-is-what-you get candidate. She’s not shy about what she stands for, and that’s for health care, child care, and union rights. I like it, but even if I didn’t I think Trump needs to be stopped. If you agree with that, Nixon will be a vote against the Trump agenda.

US Congress FL-27

First term Republican Congressperson Maria Salazar is also running away from her record. Having supported funds for ICE and most everything else Trump, she’s now trying to pivot. Her campaign mailers disguise that the she is the incumbent! It would be a pity to reward that. Democrat Elliott Rodriguez, like Salazar a former TV anchor, is a pretty conservative Democrat as things go these days, but he may be right for the district. Safe pair of hands if you worry about liberal Democrats: He won’t be one.

State Offices

Florida Governor

Republican Byron Donalds, currently the rep for the 19th Congressional district, is a surprisingly undistinguished candidate. His claims to fame include being an official Trump surrogate in the 2024 campaign, voting the Trump line in Congress, and enjoying the Trump endorsement in this campaign. The Miami Herald recently reported that Donalds and his wife Erika Donalds have made their large fortune by scoring tens of millions in state education funds for charter schools and online education. Ick.,

David Jolly is a former Republican who switched parties to run as a Democrat. I will vote for him a bit reluctantly, but Donalds is pretty awful.

Florida Attorney General

This is the race I’m most passionate about, both because I’m a law professor and because it features the biggest sleaze in the election, which this year is no mean feat. What’s more, the other candidate is a terrific, smart, guy who would do a great job.

The champion sleaze is James Uthmeier, the DeSantis-appointed incumbent. Like Moody, Uthmeier was involved in approving taking public money for partisan ends in the Hope Florida scandal. He supported a suit to overturn Biden’s election. Uthmeier’s other claim to fame is trampling the rule of law while Florida AG. In June 2025, U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams held Uthmeier in contempt of court for continuing to enforce a Florida immigration law that the judge had blocked in a previous ruling. Uthmeier had directed state law enforcement to ignore the court and then bragged about it in media interviews.

Uthmeier was also involved in the illegal and massively expensive boondoggle that was Alligator Alcatraz, the Florida concentration camp featuring tiny cages to hold detainees—so small they couldn’t stand.

And he’s signed several briefs organized by republican attorney generals seeking changes in the law that had no defensible basis. An example is the attempt to end birthright citizenship, but there are many others. He’s been involved in manipulative and unsuccessful attempts to change the summaries of ballot initiatives, thus trying to undermine the democratic process.

We are very fortunate that the Democratic candidate, Jose Javier Rodriguez, is as good as Uthmeier is bad. JJR was a leading state rep and state senator. He was a leader in opposing excessive rate increase requests by FPL. He was defeated for his 2020 reelection by a dirty trick: the GOP ran a fake candidate also named Rodriguez who siphoned off votes. The fake candidate was organized and paid by a Republican operative who went to jail for it.

Rodriquez is a fine lawyer and a fine person with an admiral record scrutinizing public spending and jail conditions while in the legislature. Everyone who I know who knows him says he’s a great guy. This is one of the most important races on the ballot.

Chief Financial Officer

Much as I like Annette Taddeo as a person, I do get a bit tired of voting for her in campaigns that fizzle. Good person, can do the job. Hope the Nth time is the charm.

Commissioner of Agriculture

Haven’t focused much, but I guess I’ll vote for Joey Atkins.

State Senator District 38

A very uphill fight, but Richard Lamondin, Jr. is I am told a stand up candidate. Alexis Calatayud, the incumbent, has vastly outraised him, The only good thing I know about her is that she was the only Republican to vote against Florida’s six-week abortion ban. It would be good to deny Republicans a super-majority in our deeply gerrymandered state legislature.

Florida State Constitutional Amendments (vote NO on all especially Amendment 3)

The main even is Amendment 3, which will drastically cut homestead property taxes.
The consequences will be that police, fire, ambulance, and just about all other locally financed social services other than schools (which are spared) will face drastic cuts – or the money will have to come from somewhere else, be it higher millage rates, renter taxes, taxes on local businesses, fees for everything, and/or sales tax increases where allowed.

It’s hard to turn down a tax cut. But this one is a bludgeon to local revenues – and was originally designed to be DeSantis’s farewell calling card to help launch his Presidential campaign. Then he discovered it wasn’t as popular as he thought and partly backed away from it. It’s really important to vote No on this ill-conceived, poorly costed out idea – that would take effect January 1, long before localities would have a chance to figure out new revenue sources. Best case if it passes is way more power for the state government at the expense of local government; worst and most likely case: chaos.

Compared to Amendment 3, the other two amendments are much less major but still worth voting against. Amendment 1 increases the size of the state slush fund aka “budget stabilization” by 150% — up to 25% of annual revenues. The Governor would get to decide how to spend it without real accountability other than his declaration of “critical need”. Remember, these are the people who brought you Hope Florida. Vote NO.

Amendment 2 would create special property tax exemptions for agribusiness. Because Big Sugar needs more money. Like Amendment 3, but on a smaller scale, the outcome would be harming local government tax receipts, which are what fund government services. Vote NO.

Posted in 2026 Elections, Coral Gables, Politics: FL-25/FL-27 | Leave a comment

In Which I Geek Out About Why You Should Update Your Marvel AQtion 10bit Network Adapter

Posted on September 3, 2026 by Michael Froomkin

I have an Asus Z790 atx motherboard on my home desktop and I’ve been happy with it. Except one thing (I’ll get to that).

The ethernet port is attached to a Marvel AQtion 10bit network adapter, which sounds vastly surplus to requirements given I have a 1 MB wired home network, and only 1.2 Mb internet to the 2MB capable router. I do have a somewhat Rube Goldberg system for playing music to my Swann powered desktop speakers which are connected to a Fiio K11. The music source is controlled via a Roon Nucleus One, accessed via my PC (Windows 11) with the actual music coming off my personal music library stored on my Synology NAS, or downloaded from Qoboz, a Spotify-like service that is known for the breadth of its classical music offerings.

I relate all this not to confess my evident sins in over-doing the music thing, although I swear I can hear the difference, but to explain why when I started getting drop-outs in music playback I put up with it for a very long while: while the speakers are rocks, and the Fiio DSP seemed unlikely to be a problem, that left an awful lot of things to troubleshoot: The internet (Comcast, ick!), the router, the PC, the NAS (also an unlikely culprit), the Nucleus One (Roon keep sending me ads to upgrade, but why would I want to?), the PC.

To simplify troubleshooting, I played only stored music from the NAS; problem continued, so unlikely to be Qoboz or the Internet. My next suspect was the Roon server, the Nucleus One. Google offered me a bunch of tips, notably reboot it daily, but none helped. Looking at the graphs on my task manger showed that the dropouts commonly were connected with a short period of packet inactivity, followed by a massive one.

So, I turned to the PC as my next suspect. Thinking it might be some CPU usage thing, or memory congestion, I killed lots of background processes. But looking at the the device manager did not show any greater CPU usage around the music drops.

The Marvel AQtion 10bit network adapter became my next suspect. When I tried to update the driver, Device Manager told me I had the most recent version of it, so I wrote off the most obvious solution. Guided by random posts online I started fiddling with the advanced settings on the network adapter. Several posts said to turn off the ‘Energy Efficient Ethernet” so I tried that but it didn’t help. I was reluctant to turn off the flow control. Instead I went to see if there was maybe a better driver on the Marvel site. And oh boy was there: the one on the Marvel site is several versions and a few years newer than the one Microsoft claimed was the latest.

So I downloaded an installed the Marvel AQtion 10bit network adapter version 3.1.11.0, instead of the version 3.1.7 or such that I had before. And voila.

Just two questions: What took me so long? And, do I turn the ‘Energy Efficient Ethernet” switch back on?

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | Comments Off on In Which I Geek Out About Why You Should Update Your Marvel AQtion 10bit Network Adapter

Early Voting Now Open for Miami-Dade August 2026 Election

Posted on August 3, 2026 by Michael Froomkin

Full official info here on times and locations.

Key points:

  • 7am-3pm M-F this week;
  • 8-4 this weekend.
  • Then, next week, 11-7 M-F
  • 8-4 again on the weekend.
  • There is NO early voting on the 17th
  • Election day is Tuesday the 18th.

See my 2026 Miami-Dade Voter Guide to the Judicial Elections for recommendations on the judicial elections.

As for the Democratic primary, I’m voting for Alex Vindman for Senate, and Robin Peguero for US Congress in FL-27, who I think will be a much stronger representative than the TV-famous candidate, not to mention the Trumpist incumbent.

Posted in 2026 Elections | 1 Comment

2026 Miami-Dade Voter Guide to the Judicial Elections

Posted on July 23, 2026 by Michael Froomkin

The first round of Miami’s elections have early voting Aug 3-13, and the actual elections are Aug. 18. But the absentee ballots have already gone out, so here are my recommendations for the Judicial part of your ballot (the lowest bit).

Personally, I’d advise you not to trust to the mails with your ballot this year, but instead put it in a dropbox during early voting, but you do you.

General Intro

Unlike most law professors I know, I support the idea of judicial elections at the state level as a reasonable democratic check on what I believe should be the expansive power of judges to interpret the state and federal constitutions.

As I’ve often said before, if it were up to me, I’d have the executive branch pick judges with legislative confirmation, followed by a California-style retention election every few years in which there would be an up or down vote on the incumbent. If the vote was down, the executive would pick a new judge. It seems to me that the right question is “has this judge done a good (enough) job” — something voters might be able to figure out — rather than asking voters to try to guess from electoral statements which of two or more candidates might be the best judge.

Florida’s system uses appointment plus retention elections for Supreme Court Justices and District Court of Appeal Judges, but not for trial courts. The Governor can appoint judges to fill vacancies between elections, but otherwise those jobs are straight up elected, so a judicial election pits one or more challengers against the incumbent unless, lacking opposition, the incumbent wins reelection automatically; many trial judges were indeed unopposed this year. There are also open seats when the incumbent retires.

My recommendations are based on:

  • My personal view that I will vote for an incumbent judge unless there’s reason to believe he/she is doing a bad job.
  • After supporting incumbents, my other rule of thumb in sizing up candidates before even getting to the details of biography and practice experience is that in all but the rarest cases of other important life experience we ought to require at least ten years of legal experience from our lawyers before even considering them as judges. Fifteen years is better. I will very rarely support a judicial candidate fewer than ten years out of law school. It just isn’t long enough to get the experience and practical wisdom it takes to be a judge.
  • I look for endorsements, including the Miami Herald. The Miami Herald is not 100% reliable, but this year I found I agreed with them in most cases.
  • And oh yes, I read local blogs and listen to gossip too. Except this year, gossip is scarce, since I’m not leaving the house much due to immunocompromise.

All registered voters in Miami-Dade County get to vote on these judges, regardless of party affiliation.

This post is mercifully short compared to some past years because an astounding number of elections for Judge (27, I think) are unopposed this year. Maybe we don’t pay them enough? In fact, there are only six contested races: five for Circuit Judge and one for County Judge. Two of the Circuit Judge races have qualified incumbents and underqualified challengers, so these are easy cases. Ditto for the County Court race.

Here are my thoughts about how to vote in the August 18, 2020 judicial elections:

Circuit Judges

Group 5

Open seat. There are three candidates. Alex Annunziato, Arthur LeMar “Marty” McNeil and Monica Segura. Alexander Annunziato is an in-house counsel at Ascendant Commercial Insurance. He has 21 years’ experience. Arthur McNeil is an Assistant Public Defender with 19 years’ experience. Monica Segura is Senior Managing Associate General Counsel for Universal Property & Casualty and has 20 years’ experience.

This isn’t a terribly hard call. McNeil has the most relevant experience, including 56 criminal jury trials and an unblemished record. Annunziato is a bit of an intriguing case as he was arrested for buying $20 worth of heroin from an undercover cop eight years ago. He didn’t contest the charge, and says he’s turned his life around. I don’t know him, and am prepared to believe it, but even so McNeil has the best bio.

(Segura, by the way, has almost no jury trial experience. Her biggest claim to fame is being married to Coral Gables Commissioner Ariel Fernandez. It would probably be wrong to hold that against her. Just don’t vote for her.)

Group 35

Open seat, easy case. Two candidates: Renee Gordon is an Assistant Public Defender with 30 years’ experience. Cristobal Padron is a family lawyer in private practice with 14 years’ experience. Both have run before and both lost by six and four percent margins respectively. I have endorsed Renee Gordon in both of her close losses, and I do it again. As I keep saying, she “has a long resume of working with troubled children in various managerial and legal capacities. This is a great background for a Judge – in the trenches and there for a long time.”

Christobal Padron has much less experience; Renee Gordon’s background is really top-notch. Maybe third time is the charm?

Group 67
Not a slam dunk, but even so…

The incumbent is Judge Mavel Ruiz. Conservatives hate her because she initially blocked the transfer of valuable downtown Miami land from Miami-Dade College to the planned Trump library. Ruiz later dismissed the case when the College complied with its legal obligation to hold a public hearing on the giveaway. Having the spine to hold authorities to their duties in a high-profile case is a plus in my book. That said, Judge Ruiz does not have an unblemished record. As clumsy attack texts hitting my phone (headed, if you can believe it, “this is not an attack ad”!) like to remind me, Judge Ruiz ran into trouble for hugging a litigant in a high-profile case, And, Judge Ruiz received a written reprimand from the Florida Supreme Court because of a letter she and four other judges signed a letter to the Florida Department of Children and Families endorsing Our Kids of Miami-Dade & Monroe. As the court noted, none of the five judges who signed that letter did it for any personal gain. So while not nothing, it’s also not that much.

Unfortunately for sticklers, the challenger, DBA Destiny Goede Alvarez, has only has only five years’ experience as lawyer (way too little, IMHO), and now works as a partner at her father’s law firm after two years at GrayRobinson. She also changed her name to her husband’s shortly before filing, more than two years after being married, no doubt aware that women with Hispanic names tend to overperform in Miami-Dade judicial elections. She has a golden c.v., with Federalist Society chops, and links to the DeSantis administration, (Could that explain the anti-Ruiz text offensive?) She is raising money hand over fist. If she loses, as she deserves to, but which is far from a sure thing, I’m sure she will land on her feet.

Ruiz unseated Judge Fleur Lobree in 2014 when Lobree deserved to be re-elected, which might in some eyes create an opportunity for karmic justice. (Ruiz was re-elected in 2020.) I don’t care how good or smart Alvarez may be, but five years’ experience is nowhere near enough for a judge.

GROUP 69

Open seat, confused by two Baez’s in the race. There are three candidates, and probably all are plausible.

Rita Baez is a personal injury lawyer in private practice with 30 years’ experience, nine as an Assistant States Attorney.

Yaneth Del Carmen Baez is an Assistant State Attorney with just 9 years’ experience in the State Attorney’s office, but the Herald endorsed her anyway based on the “intensity” of her caseload as an assistant state’s attorney, currently in the Human Trafficking Unit.  I suspect that the fact that the Judicial Nominating Commission has nominated her for a judgeship four times (which suggests that top lawyers think very highly of her), but DeSantis never picked her, might have something to do with it.

Bonita Jones-Peabody, now in private practice, was formerly an Assistant Public Defender, and has 35 years’ experience. Jones-Peabody is an experienced criminal defense lawyer with over 200 jury trials in her resume, which includes many years at the Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office before going into a varied private practice.

Rita Baez also has 80 jury trials, but on the civil side. She currently represents plaintiffs in auto accidents and slip-and-fall cases.  A credible candidate, but I think the other two are stronger.

On experience I tend to favor Jones-Peabody. The fact that the JNC repeatedly thinks so highly of Yaneth Del Carmen Baez is something to weigh against a relatively short career as a lawyer, which makes this a harder case than I would like.

GROUP 76
The incumbent is Judge Spencer Eig, a judge with 20 years on the bench, and I know of no reason to unseat him.

His challenger is Yenly Dominguez, a real estate & estate planning attorney with only 7 (!) years’ experience. Even if it was three times that much I’d vote to retain Eig.

Easy case.

County Judge
Group 25

Just one contest for Circuit Judge, pitting incumbent (since 2018) Luis Perez-Medina, challenged by attorney Maribel Diaz, the director of legal services for the Miami-Dade County Tax Collector’s office. It sounds like Diaz, who has experience with foreclosures, collections, and property tax disputes, might make a good judge. But I can see no reason at all to turf out Perez-Medina who appears to be doing a fine job.

Posted in 2026 Elections, Miami | 1 Comment

2026 Primary Voter Guide is Coming!

Posted on July 21, 2026 by Michael Froomkin

Several folks have reached out to ask if the judicial (and other) voter guide is coming. Yes it is. I just have to get this rather large thing done first.

i hope to have guide up before the end of the week, maybe sooner if the stars align. Sorry for the delay.

Posted in Coral Gables | 1 Comment

Research Assistant Wanted

Posted on January 7, 2026 by Michael Froomkin

Copright 'brizzle born and bred' Some rights reserved, https://secure.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/I would like to hire a UM 2L to be my research assistant for 10-15 hours/week during the coming semester. If things work out we might continue into the summer, and/or next year.

The work primarily involves assisting me with legal research and other academic work relating to privacy and/or artificial intelligence, but also helping out on other random things.

I need someone who can write clearly and is well-organized.

The pay of $15 / hr is set by the university, and is not as high as you deserve, but the work is sometimes interesting.

If this sounds attractive, please e-mail me a note with the subject line RESEARCH ASSISTANT 2026 (in all caps), followed by your name and including the following:

  1. Where you saw this announcement
  2. How many hours you would ideally like to work per week (10-12 is quite normal)
  3. When you are free to start.
  4. Your phone number and email address.
  5. Several times you would be free to meet for a zoom interview in the next week or so.
  6. If you happen to have any experience with programming, Unix, or system administration, please mention that, as I can use that; I may even have a second job available for someone with these skills.  But please don’t be deterred from applying if you don’t happen to know about those.

Please attach:

  1. A copy of your resume (c.v.).
  2. A transcript of your grades (need not be an official copy).
  3. If you have one handy, also attach a short NON-legal writing sample. If you have none, I’ll accept a legal writing sample (whatever you do, though, please don’t send your L-Comm memo as it’s too hard to tell how much they’ve been edited by your instructor).

I look forward to speaking with you.

Posted in U.Miami | Comments Off on Research Assistant Wanted