Maria Zack — who wants to end all vaccine mandates, eliminate property taxes, and believes Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election — is the new Republican nominee to run for a vacant seat in the Florida House of Representatives.
Unofficial results posted by the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Office showed Zack with 53% of the vote and Bill Reicherter with 47% in Tuesday’s primary.
Zack received 1,419 votes to Reicherter’s 1,260.
A handful of mail ballots remain uncounted. But the number is so small the outcome won’t change.
The newly minted Republican nominee will face Democrat Rob Long in a December special election to fill the vacancy created by the July death of state Rep. Joe Casello.
As is typical of special elections at unusual times, turnout was exceedingly low. Of the 31,208 active registered voters in the 90th House District, 2,686 — just 8.6% — voted in the primary, Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections unofficial results whow.
Florida is a closed primary state, so only Republicans were eligible to vote. Long is the only Democrat running, so his party had no primary.
Zack doesn’t accept that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. Asked in a September interview who won, she said, “I can’t tell you. I assume it was President Trump, but I can’t tell you until there’s a full investigation with all its affidavits and transparency.”
Reicherter said Biden won a majority of electoral votes and was president. And in a written questionnaire answer, he called Zack “a single-issue conspiracy theorist.” Zack objected to the way Reicherter characterized her. “To call people names is very ridiculous and very unprofessional,” she said.
Florida House of Representatives District 90 is in southeastern Palm Beach County. (Floridaredistricting.gov/courtesy)
The two Republican candidates disagreed on several issues.
Zack said all vaccine mandates should be eliminated. Reicherter said longstanding childhood vaccine mandates should continue. He said he opposes mandates for what he termed “new vaccines.”
Zack said she’d like to see property taxes eliminated. Reicherter said he’d like to see relief for property taxpayers but said elimination isn’t realistic because without that revenue local governments wouldn’t have the money to pay for vital services.
District 90 is essentially a Delray Beach-Boynton Beach district bordered by Hypoluxo Road in the north, Military Trail on the west (with a couple of pockets west of Military), the Delray Beach-Boca Raton border on the South and the Atlantic Ocean on the east.
Besides the newly minted Republican nominee and Democrat Long, who is a member of the Delray Beach City Commission, no party affiliation candidate Karen Yeh will be on the Dec. 9 special general election ballot.
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The 90th House District is heavily Democratic.
Registered voters are about 40% Democratic, 30% Republican, 27% no party affiliation/independent with the rest in various minor parties. In the 2024 presidential election, Democrat Kamala Harris won 54.6% of the vote in District 90 and Republican Trump received 44.2%, according to an analysis by Democratic data analyst Matthew Isbell.
Still, special elections almost always have low turnout, making the outcome trickier to predict since a small number of voters can have a huge impact. And the final stretch of the District 90 campaign — between Thanksgiving in November and Hanukkah and Christmas in December — isn’t a prime time for politics, with most people focused on other things.
Political writer Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.
