LAND O’LAKES, FL — Nudists in Pasco County, FL, will have to do the unthinkable Tuesday before heading to the polls.They’ll have to don clothing.
Pasco County elections supervisor Brian Corley summarily dismissed requests from the residents of Caliente Resort, which claims to be the largest social nudist community in the U.S., that the county establish a clothing-optional polling place.
“I think they’re just doing some marketing hype,” Corley told the St. Petersburg Times.
Caliente residents submitted their request in late October. Corley said even if he’d wanted to grant the request there wasn’t enough time to establish a new precinct.
In fact, he said, the first opportunity the county will have to create a new polling place is during the 2012 election cycle, when the County Commission conducts its once-a-decade voting district reapportionment.
“Polling places, you don’t tinker with them before apportionment unless you have to,” Corley told the Times.
But logistics concerns run deeper than just bureaucratic red tape, Corley noted. One pressing question: Where would poll workers wear their badges?
“Even if I was behind what they were asking for — which I explained I am not — it’s just too much to ask right now,” he told the Times.
Nothing in state law prohibits voting in the nude, so Pasco hasn’t completely ruled out the request. However, he told Fox 13 News that even in 2012, new polling places will be established based “on need and population,” and he’s not sure Caliente’s population of 350 voting-age residents and 200 staff (many of whom work in the buff) constitutes a legitimate need.
For the foreseeable future, Caliente residents will have to content themselves with donning clothes and traveling less than two miles to a polling place in a nearby “textile” (the nudist term for people who wear clothes) community. Alternatively, as one county commissioner suggested, they can vote in the nude via absentee ballot.
The residents remain steadfast in their desire, however. For them, larger issues are involved.
“It’s about freedom,” Caliente spokeswoman Angye Fox Told Fox 13 News.
“People take their civic duty seriously, and in many cases [nudism] is a very serious part of their lifestyle.”
