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Kelvin Soto
In Osceola’s Clerk of the Courts race on Aug. 18, Kelvin Soto ousted two-term incumbent Armando Ramirez, who placed third.
Soto won the election outright because no Republican or write-in candidate qualified for the seat.
Soto, an Osceola County School Board member, received about 43 percent of the 49,641 votes cast in the race.
Former Florida State House Representative John Cortes came in second with 21.6 percent. Ramirez finished third with about 20 percent of the vote.
Soto replaces Ramirez, a controversial figure who dodged multiple corruption allegations since taking office in 2013.
Most recently, whistleblower complaints filed in February allege misconduct among Clerk’s Office employees as well as failure of oversight by Ramirez himself.
News media outlets raised similar allegations of nepotism, budget issues and policy violations against Ramirez in 2014 and 2015.
Ramirez’s opponents ran all year on platforms of increased transparency and accountability within the Clerk’s Office, which oversees everything from archiving court records to managing juries and handling evidence introduced in the courtroom.
Soto, a civil litigation attorney, was elected to the School Board in 2012. He told the News-Gazette Tuesday night that running for Clerk of the Courts was a natural political transition that befits both his professional background and life-long dedication to public service.
“I had a lot of people helping me on this journey. You can’t win a race like this without a lot of folks advising you and helping you and encouraging you. This is as much as a win for them as it is for me,” said Soto, who was in a School Board meeting when the race was called.
Soto added: “I made it a point not to be aware of the results coming in. I wanted my focus to be on what was happening in the meeting. At the end, I heard a commotion and people saying I was ahead.”
Soto raised nearly $60,000 for his campaign and snagged high-profile endorsements from fellow attorneys and the Orlando Sentinel.
His strategic vision for the office includes “reassessing and reinventing processes to provide better service in the face of COVID-19,” he said.
Other priorities include technology upgrades, hiring additional Spanish-speaking translations and re-organizing the office from the ground up.
Soto said his first order of business will be one-on-one meetings with each of the 150 employees of the clerk’s office.
“I want to introduce myself and get to know about them and want to hear what they have to tell me,” he said.
