Mama Mia! Sweetwater mayor’s mami keeps her seat

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The vote tally seems like a mandate for the mayor’s mama: Sweetwater Councilwoman Isolina Maroño won the seat she was appointed to in her first election and by a landslide.

Beating activist Deborah Centeno 72 percent to 28 last week is vindication for both the councilwoman and her son, Mayor Manny Maroño, who were both targeted in the only contested campaign that basically bashed the city government for being a family business.

Both the home and cellphone numbers for Councilwoman Maroño were out of service when Ladra called. Mayor Maroño, reached by phone, did not welcome my congratulations. “No comment,” he said when asked if he thought this was a resounding vote of confidence in his leadership. We supposed he does not like how Ladra exposed suspicions that his mother has played a role in absentee ballot manipulation.

But a closer look at the numbers could indicate that allegations of absentee ballot fraud and manipulation may actually be at play. Sure, Centeno lost on both the ABs and Election Day. But the margins are widely different.

Mama Maroño didn’t beat Centeno 2 to 1 on May 14 ballots — with less than 100 votes between the 231 for the incumbent and 152 for the challenger, a former Community Council member. The difference grows to almost 4 to 1 in the ABs, with Maroño scoring 820 to Centeno’s 241. Early voters were even less decisively pro-incumbent, with 14 votes going to Maroño and 13 going to Centeno.

In one precinct, the AB margin was 120 for the incumbent, nine for the challenger.

Those numbers may give some credence to arguments that Maroño — who has been paid by several candidates for “campaign work” — is a boletera herself. And that she had the election sewn up there.

Though Councilwoman Maroño was not reachable after the election, she spoke to Ladra before the race and vehemently denied being a boletera. She said that other candidates — from Gov. Rick Scott to Sen. Rene Garcia, State Rep. Carlos Trujillo and former State Sen. Rudy Garcia, who ran, and lost, for Hialeah Mayor — had paid her for her recommendation (read: strong “recommendation” to absentee ballot voters).

But Centeno and her campaign manager, Pedro Diaz, told me they heard the same concerns we’ve heard from elderly voters in Hialeah, where AB fraud is documented — that they were afraid they would lose their housing or their monthly food baskets from the city, which, in this case, are delivered by Councilwoman Maroño herself.

“There is a lot of fear,” Centeno told me, adding that other city electeds, such as Councilman Manuel Duasso, and some city staffers worked the precincts and intimidated voters to vote for the mayor’s mama.

She said Duasso told her he would have supported her run against someone else. But her agenda was not to win a seat, her agenda was to fight the nepotism she sees at City Hall.

“That was the seat to run for,” she told Ladra.

And she thought the public was behind her on that.

“Definitely, the results do not reflect what we heard on the street,” Centeno said.

But where ABs are involved, the results rarely do.

Diaz, who has taken the loss rather personally, said that the only way to campaign in Sweetwater is with a private investigator to ensure that the absentee ballot machine is either turned off or documented.

“You have to campaign and investigate concurrently,” he told me.

While this campaign did not have the funds for that, Ladra suspects Diaz will find another candidate to run in Sweetwater.

And P.I.s — I can think of one or two who may be interested — should take note.