Tallahassee City Commission Seats and Elections

The Tallahassee City Commission has five members, and each one holds a numbered seat. The mayor sits in Seat 4 and casts one vote like the other four. As of October 9, 2026, the City of Tallahassee lists Commissioner Jacqueline 'Jack' Porter in Seat 1, Mayor Pro Tem Curtis Richardson in Seat 2, Commissioner Jeremy Matlow in Seat 3, Mayor John E. Dailey in Seat 4 and Commissioner Dianne Williams-Cox in Seat 5. Last verified: October 9, 2026, on the City of Tallahassee website.

The numbers are ballot labels, not territory. All five city commissioners are elected citywide, as the Tallahassee Democrat put it in March 2024, so a voter in Killearn and a voter on the Southside mark the same contests for every seat.

The board has been this size since 1950. In that year, according to Gerald Ensley's history of city government, republished by the Tallahassee Democrat in August 2024, the commission expanded from three to five members to provide more representation for a growing city population. The original 1920 commission had three members. Ensley also records two milestones from the early years of the five-seat board: in 1971 James Ford became the first Black commissioner, and in 1972 Joan Heggen became the first woman commissioner.

Terms run four years and are staggered so that the whole board never turns over at once. The City of Tallahassee describes the pattern this way: elections are held in even-numbered years, with two seats during Presidential election cycles and two others, plus the mayor, in mid-term election cycles. In practice that splits the board into two groups. Seats 1 and 2 were on the ballot in 2024, a presidential year, and Seats 3 and 5 share the 2026 ballot with the mayor's Seat 4.

For 2026 the Leon County Supervisor of Elections lists the primary election on August 18 and the general election on November 3. The voter registration deadline for the general election was October 5, early voting runs Monday, October 19 through Sunday, November 1, and the deadline to request that a ballot be mailed is October 22. The city's citizen input page already shows a City Commission Reorganization Meeting on Monday, November 16, 2026 at 5 p.m., two weeks after the general election, when the new board organizes at City Hall on South Adams Street.

City races ride the same Leon County ballot as county, school board and state contests. The September 28, 2026 candidate forums organized by the Tallahassee Democrat, the League of Women Voters and the Capital Region News Collaborative covered City Commission Seats 3, 4 and 5 alongside the Leon County Commission District 3 and District 5 races and State Representative District 9, according to the Democrat's October 3, 2026 recap.

City races are nonpartisan, so every voter registered inside the city limits can vote in them in August regardless of party. A candidate who wins a majority in the August primary takes the seat. When no one clears 50 percent, the top two finishers meet again in November. WFSU's August 21, 2024 report shows both outcomes on one night: Commissioner Jack Porter won Seat 1 with more than 53% of the vote, while in the four-person Seat 2 race no candidate received more than 50%, sending the top two to a runoff in the general election.

One rule changed in 2024. Before then, a race with only two candidates was settled in the August primary, when turnout in Leon County is lower. On November 5, 2024, almost 70% of voters backed moving those two-candidate races to the general election, and the City Commission had voted unanimously to put the change on the ballot, WFSU reported. The last two-candidate commission race decided in August was in 2022, when Commissioner Jeremy Matlow kept his seat with 55.8% support.

The 2026 Seat 3 race showed how thin the line for second place can be. A 24-vote difference between the second- and third-place finishers in the August 18 primary triggered a recount. The Leon County Canvassing Board reviewed vote-by-mail and provisional ballots, the margin narrowed to 15 votes, and a manual recount of 2,021 undervote and overvote ballots confirmed the top two. Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley said nothing substantial changed, and the two finishers advance to the November 3 runoff, according to the Tallahassee Democrat's August 23, 2026 report, which noted that the race is non-partisan.

The question came up most recently during the 2023 to 2024 charter review. Single-member districts were one of the proposals before the Charter Review Committee, and the committee ultimately voted against them and kept the commission at five members rather than expanding to seven or more, the Tallahassee Democrat reported in March 2024. The paper laid out the stakes plainly: the citywide system has allowed Black candidates to win office for the last half century, but it has also kept a Republican off the commission for the past 20-plus years.

Geography explains the split. A single-member plan would open the door to a district in the northeast, where Republican voters in Leon County are concentrated. The Leon County Republican Party pushed for districts, and the Killearn Homeowners Association's board voted unanimously for the idea in February 2024, while the local Democratic Party opposed it. Seat 5 Commissioner Dianne Williams-Cox, whose city biography notes she founded the Southside United Citizens Action Alliance, sits on a board elected entirely at large.

The concern about minority representation was voiced on the dais before the review began. In August 2023, the Democrat reported, Commissioners Curtis Richardson and Jack Porter both raised the effect districts could have on diversity, with Porter warning that districts drawn on the city's residential patterns could leave only one commissioner of color. The same article recorded that Leon County and other local governments review their charters every 10 years, while the city had not had a review since 2009.

The commission is the governing body of the City of Tallahassee: it sets the policies and rules the city operates by, establishes goals and target issues, sets city tax rates, and appoints four officers to administer the city. Regular meetings at City Hall are typically held twice a month, the city's commission page says, with workshops on specific issues. The policy manual includes Policy 144, Filling Unanticipated Commission Vacancies, administered by the City Treasurer-Clerk.

Pay was settled by the 2024 vote. Before it, city commissioners other than the mayor earned half of what Leon County commissioners earn, almost $50,000, while the mayor already earned the same as a county commissioner. The amendment tied commissioners' annual salary to county commissioner pay, almost $100,000, and passed with 56%, the lowest support of the five amendments, WFSU reported. The same ballot extended the Independent Ethics Board's jurisdiction to commissioners serving on outside bodies such as the Blueprint Intergovernmental Agency and the Community Redevelopment Agency (over 72% support) and set a charter review every 10 years (almost 81%).

Those outside seats are a large part of the job. Seat 3 Commissioner Jeremy Matlow, for example, sits on the CRA and the Blueprint Intergovernmental Agency and is a member of the Capital Regional Transportation Planning Agency, the Downtown Improvement Authority and the Council on Culture & Arts, according to his city page, which also credits him with work on the revitalization of Gaines Street and the All Saints District before his 2018 election.

The City of Tallahassee does not run its own elections. The Leon County Supervisor of Elections, Mark S. Earley, conducts them from the office at 2990-1 Apalachee Parkway, and the supervisor's home page counted 184,618 active registered voters in Leon County as of October 9, 2026: 88,254 Democrats, 54,674 Republicans and 41,690 others. That is a countywide figure; only voters who live inside the city limits get city seats on their ballot.

Early voting in Leon County is open at any of 10 sites, according to the supervisor's early voting page, which notes that the county offers more days than the eight-day state minimum. The list follows the city's map: the Leon County Courthouse on South Monroe Street, the Leon County Elections Center on Apalachee Parkway, the Dr. B.L. Perry Jr. Branch Library on South Adams Street, the student unions at Florida State University (the FSU Student Union) and Florida A&M University (the FAMU Efferson Student Union), the Bruce J. Host Northeast Branch Library on Thomasville Road, the Eastside Branch Library, and the Lake Jackson, Woodville and Fort Braden community centers. Each site has a Secure Ballot Intake Station for returning a Leon County vote-by-mail ballot during voting hours.