Sham candidates not the only deception
Frank Artiles once bragged to a crowd that the plot to recruit a sham candidate to siphon votes away from a Democratic senator last year was “all me.”
We aren’t shedding any tears over his arrest last week for allegedly offering that candidate money to enter the District 37 race for the Florida Senate. It’s likely that Artiles’ plot resulted in incumbent Jose Javier Rodriguez losing by a mere 32 votes after a recount. But as much as we would like to see Artiles, a former senator, face justice, we have a hunch that the state attorney’s office has only scratched the surface of this case.
Like the rest of Miami’s political establishment, we’re waiting to see whether his arrest will unleash a domino effect.
Was Artiles working on his own or was he a political fixer doing someone else’s dirty tricks? Miami-Dade State Attorney
Katherine Fernandez Rundle must answer that.
It’s hard to believe Artiles just offered to pay $50,000 out of his own pocket to Alex Rodriguez. And what about the mystery donor who paid $360,000 to a political committee for advertisement in this race and whose address led to a UPS store in Atlanta? That donor, Proclivity, was also behind ads in two other important Senate races in Miami-Dade and Seminole County where third-party candidates also seem to have been planted, Politico reported. (While we’re at it, let’s talk about how Florida’s lax campaign-finance laws allow for dark-money funding of political campaigns. Republicans lawmakers hell-bent on making it harder to vote by mail should direct their energy toward campaign finance reform instead).
“Money like that isn’t allocated to these things without leadership knowing about it,” J.C.
Planas, Jose Javier Rodriguez’s lawyer during the recount and a former state representative, told the Editorial Board. “It’s great that we are arresting Artiles but … I care more about who directed the money, where the money came from and putting a stop to it.”
The Senate president and the political committee that runs Republican campaigns for the state Senate denied any involvement in Artiles’ alleged scheme. There’s no evidence Republican Sen. Ileana Garcia, who won the Senate District 37 race, knew about it either, according to the State Attorney’s Office.
But there was a lot at stake in District 37 and those two other Senate races. The GOP won all three and thwarted a Democratic attempt to get closer to even representation in the Senate. Had Democrats been successful, they could have controlled 19 of 40 Senate seats, making the GOP one Republican flip-vote away from jeopardizing its agenda and that of its donors. That’s crucial in any year, but especially in 2021, when lawmakers will begin redrawing legislative districts that will shape Florida politics for the next decade.
The sad part is that Artiles — and whoever might be behind him — could have hijacked the
District 37 race through legal means. Recruiting a third-party candidate isn’t a crime, and lax residency requirements make it even easier for candidates to run in districts in which they don’t live (Alex Rodriguez lived in Boca Raton). Florida politicians have long used legal tricks — such as the “write-in loophole,” for example — to close primaries to by recruiting someone to file as a write-in candidate.
What landed Artiles in jail was allegedly taking it too far
and believing he could get away with it — and then bragging about it later, as the Herald reported last year. He and Alex Rodriguez now face third-degree felony charges related to violating campaign-finance law.
“It was a sloppy operation and I think it was a belief they could get around the law,” FIU political science professor Dario Moreno told the Editorial Board.
If the authorities do their job, we might find out how big that operation was.