Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Mysterious candidate who likely swayed tight Florida Senate race under investigation


https://news.yahoo.com/mysterious-candidate-likely-swayed-tight-233054034.html

Samantha J. Gross, Ana Ceballos
Tue, November 17, 2020, 6:30 PM EST

The razor-thin victory that delivered Latinas for Trump co-founder Ileana Garcia to the Florida Senate and ousted Democrat José Javier Rodríguez continues to raise eyebrows for one reason: a mysterious third candidate named Alex Rodriguez.

Alex Rodriguez, a one-time mechanic with no history in local politics, never started a campaign website, attended no candidate forums and received no donations, save for a $2,000 loan from himself. Mailers pitching his name sent to voters in the Coral Gables area were sent by a shadowy political group that, so far, has been untraceable.

When a television reporter recently tracked Alex Rodriguez down, he pretended to be someone else.

Alex Rodriguez’s candidacy appeared to exist for only one reason: to suck votes away from incumbent José Javier Rodríguez, who shares the same surname. The incumbent lost by just 34 votes, and he is now calling for an investigation into Alex Rodriguez — and whoever may have put him up to run.


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reporters found Rodriguez renting a home in Palm Beach County, not in Miami-Dade County where he filed to vote and run for state office.

In a video message shortly after conceding the race, the incumbent Democrat Rodríguez expressed alarm at the influence of the third candidate, who earned more than 6,300 votes.

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In Florida, candidates must sign an oath that lists their residency, but the oath doesn’t cite the penalties for lying, and no one actively checks to make sure candidates are qualified to run for a given office. The county supervisors of election don’t play a role in enforcing the rule, as their offices are “ministerial, not investigative,” a spokeswoman for the Miami-Dade County Elections Department said.

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Senate Democratic Leader Gary Farmer, who observed the recount last week, told the Herald that Alex Rodriguez’s candidacy calls into question the state’s elections laws, which he says “don’t really have enough teeth in them.”

“Alex Rodriguez may have lied about his address, but that would not have been enough to knock him off the ballot in any event,” he said. “We really don’t discourage this type of activity in any way under our laws. It’s those types of things that create a distrust in the overall system.”

He added that regardless of the outcome of the investigation, the law still doesn’t provide for a new election.

“A society that really cared about having fair elections would do more to discourage and punish this type of behavior,” he said.

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Former Sen. Rodríguez blamed Senate Republican leaders for planting the third-party candidate in the race, saying “Tallahassee Republicans ran one unethical campaign with two candidates,” referring to Garcia and Alex Rodriguez.

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Rodriguez, 55, is not the only no-party candidate backed by dark money who ran in competitive state Senate races this year. Celso Alfonso is a no-party candidate who ran in Senate District 39, and whose candidacy shared similarities to Rodriguez’s. Both candidates’ email addresses are Gmail accounts with identical patterns: first initial, last name, district number and “2020.” They also have identical campaign finance records, both only reporting $2,000 loans to themselves, and using the money to pay for the $1,187.88 filing fee required of no-party candidates for state Senate.

Both Rodriguez and Alfonso were registered Republicans when they voted in the 2018 midterm elections. Both qualified for the 2020 election the same day, with checks hand-delivered in Tallahassee and time-stamped within minutes of one another.


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