Where does Orange County GOP State Committeewoman Debbie Galvin live? 

When Debbie Galvin filed her Candidate Oath on May 28, 2024, to run for Orange County Republican State Committeewoman — the seat she won by 51 percent on Aug. 20 — she listed her address as 6126 Payne Stewart Drive in Windermere. She receives mail there. She’s registered to vote there. 

Except that Galvin doesn’t live on Payne Stewart Drive. 

That’s according to the resident who does live at 6126 Payne Stewart Drive who spoke with VoxPopuli Monday. Sydney Robbes — we're using a pseudonym because she did not want to be identified by her real name because of the volatility around election issues — told VoxPopuli that she moved into the house on May 15, 2024, which is 13 days before Galvin submitted her campaign documents to the Supervisor of Elections. Before Robbes moved in, she said, another couple lived in the house for a year. 

The house on Payne Stewart Drive, located in Isleworth, the wealthy neighborhood between Dr. Phillips and the Town of Windermere, is owned by Miami tax attorneys David and Regina Gilinsky. The Gilinskys bought it as an investment property, according to Robbes, and they have never lived there. They have not responded to requests for comment. 

Robbes swore out an affidavit that she is the sole resident of the property on July 19, 2024. She did so, she told VoxPopuli, because she continues to receive mail addressed to Galvin — even letters from the Orange County Supervisor of Elections. 

“I got something for her Saturday. I keep giving it back to the Post Office,” Robbes said, adding that the postal carrier, seeing mail for Galvin, groaned, “Oh … Debbie!”

“What’s right and fair” 

Orlando criminal defense attorney Mark C. Bender, who describes himself as “Republican, a very strong conservative,” intends to file a lawsuit in the coming days to request that Galvin's election be declared invalid. He wants Galvin removed from office “because of the fraudulent filing of her Candidate Oath and other paperwork,” he told VoxPopuli in a Monday phone call.  

“Whether it's Democrat or Republican, if you lie or cheat, commit fraud, then you need to be brought out regardless of your party affiliation,” said Bender. He said he's working on this situation — he wouldn’t even call it a “case” — pro bono.

“I'm representing what's right and fair here in the Orange GOP,” he said. 

Falsifying a Candidate Oath and submitting false voter registration information is a third degree felony under Florida Statute 104. 011, Bender said.  

According to the statute: “A person who willfully swears or affirms falsely to any oath or affirmation ... in connection with or arising out of voting or elections commits a felony of the third degree …”

Bender gets that going after a county-level intra-party position might seem “kind of small potatoes,” but “the law is the law," he said.  

“We have here a candidate, who is an incumbent, who certainly knows the election laws, flaunting them,” he said. “It bothers me as a person who believes in election integrity.”

Two potential felonies 

Another person who’s bothered is Winter Park attorney Bonnie Jackson, one of two other candidates in the race for State Committeewoman. (The other candidate withdrew before the election). 

Jackson wants the Republican Party of Florida to seat her instead. “I think that's a perfectly fair and just outcome because [Galvin] lied, and the law isn't supposed to reward people for lying. That's my position on it,” she told VoxPopuli Monday.

“I'm an attorney, and so I take integrity and honesty very seriously,” she said. “Debbie, who is supposedly a psychotherapist, who has to be licensed by the state of Florida, she should also take that very seriously.” 

Jackson believes Galvin may have committed a second felony — voting out of precinct. 

“It's my understanding that where she does actually live is also a completely different precinct. If that's the case, then when she voted in this election cycle, and the last one for that matter, she committed a separate felony because you can only vote in the precinct of your legal residence.”  

According to records obtained by VoxPopuli, Galvin appears to live at 9215 Palm Tree Drive in Silver Woods, a middle-class neighborhood of mid- to late-1980s single family homes off of Apopka Vineland Road, between Conroy Windermere Road and Sand Lake Road. Her 2018 Mercedes is registered to that Palm Tree Drive address. 

The Palm Tree Drive house is a rental, owned by Steve and Ingrid Clapp’s Clapp Family Trust, and it's about three miles from the Payne Stewart Drive house Galvin continues to claim as her address. Voter registration records show that she is registered to vote at the Payne Stewart Drive address, which is in Orange County Precinct 129. The Palm Tree Drive house is in Precinct 905S. 

Galvin, who describes herself as a "Christian psychotherapist" on her Facebook practice page, has been associated with 17 other addresses in Central Florida since 1990, mainly rental apartments in Ocala, Orlando, Lake Mary and Ocoee. She has never owned a home. In November 2020, she was charged with having more than one valid Florida driver’s license, a first-degree misdemeanor. The charges were eventually dropped. 

The Supervisor of Elections can't do much in a case like this where all of the candidate qualifying forms are complete on their face, but the information is inaccurate. By Florida statute, the elections filing officer merely “performs a ministerial function in reviewing qualifying papers …[and] may not determine whether the contents of the qualifying papers are accurate.” 

But Bender, the attorney, has been following how an election-related lawsuit, brought by a candidate, recently played out. Supervisor of Elections Glen Gilzean was off the hook for not checking that Cynthia Harris, a former candidate in the Supervisor of Elections race, paid her qualifying fee from her campaign bank account (she paid from her personal account) and that the office had a bank depository form from her for the correct bank (they didn't). Meanwhile, the judge removed Harris from the ballot for violating election law, as the one responsible for ensuring the information on her forms was correct.

"We believe the judge has the authority to do that with the State Committeewoman, based on the same fraud, if you will," Bender said. "Because what made this even worse for Ms. Harris was that she lied about it. She said, This check was from a campaign account, and she lied. And they had an expert say that the forms were fraudulent. So that doesn't look good, right? I mean, you can say I made an honest mistake. You can almost understand that. But then the lie about it is even worse than the actual sin."

Jackson said she is also considering pursuing legal action. 

“She hasn’t lived here for six years”  

VoxPopuli stopped by the Palm Tree Drive house Monday and rang the bell twice. Dogs barked, but no one came to the door. Galvin’s cell phone voice mail is not accepting messages. The phone number listed on her Facebook page for her psychotherapy practice goes to an automated message retrieval system. Her practice website is inactive. She has not responded to email sent to two email addresses. 

Bender said that Galvin once lived at the Payne Stewart Drive address with a former boyfriend. 

VoxPopuli confirmed that with Christopher Murvin, an attorney in Deland, who owned the house for 10 years. He told VoxPopuli that Galvin lived there with him for a time but that “she hasn’t lived there for over six years.” Murvin sold the house in 2019.

“I think she uses that address, and this is just a personal opinion," Bender said, "for vanity because it's Isleworth and very glamorous, very ritzy. It’s one of the high-end neighborhoods in Central Florida. So I think she uses that to try to impress people."