A Homestead voter said two men came to her house Wednesday and filled out ballots for her and three family members — before the voters realized that at least one ballot was marked for the wrong candidates.
Those candidates, according to one of four ballots filled out, are mayoral hopeful Mark Bell, the husband of Miami-Dade Commission Vice Chair Lynda Bell, and former Councilman Norman Hodge, who is running against incumbent Councilman Jimmie Williams. Hodge was also picked as vice mayor.
Betty Brockington, 53, told Ladra Friday morning that they had told the the men — who said they were with Councilman Williams’ campaign — that she told the men she wanted to vote for Williams, for Councilman Stephen Shelley as vice mayor and for former Councilman Jeff Porter, who is in the mayoral runoff with Bell.
But before the men could leave, Brockington’s 22-year-old niece balked.
“She said, ‘He don’t vote for me.’ And she came back out and told him, ‘You give me my envelope,'” Brocking said. “She checked hers and saw that he had put the other guys’ names. Bell and Norman Hodge and Norman Hodge,” Brockington said.
The other three ballots, however, were taken from the home and Brockington said she never saw which candidates were indicated on them.
“I don’t know what they put on those. We never saw them,” Brockington told Ladra, adding that when she went to get her niece’s ballot, she returned to find the other three ballots were already sealed. She said she had signed them but never saw how it was filled out.
She also told me that she had told the men that she always gives her ballot to Timothy Melton, a local activist who is working a get-out-the-vote campaign for Porter and Williams (many say he works specifically on absentee ballots). The men indicated that they worked with Melton, she said.
Melton told Ladra late Thursday that he did not work with the men and that he had talked to Brockington’s niece, who told him she had an interview today with someone from the county’s absentee ballot fraud task force. Brockington told Ladra that a woman from the task force who spoke to her niece said they would get back to the family.
Brockington identified one of the campaign workers as James Brady, a local GOP committeeman who received the 2012 volunteer of the year award from the Miami-Dade Republican Party and is president of the Inner City Urban Republican Club. She said the other man was Haitian and that she did not get his name.
Brady told Ladra Friday morning that he was working for the Bell campaign, and that he was out canvassing Wednesday, but that he did not remember the incident.
“I helped her fill it out? Un-uh. That is definitely a lie,” Brady told me in a telephone interview. I explained that Brockington said the Haitian-American man with him was the one to actually fill out the ballots. “I don’t remember that, no.”
He said only works with one man, who is not Haitian, that he supervises a group of mostly women — “females are way better than guys when you are campaigning” — and that what they do is take a sample ballot downloaded from the city’s website, and help people figure out where to vote for their chosen candidate.
For that, he was paid at least $1,100 by the Bell campaign, as of the reports filed in September. The next reports are due today.
Ladra called lobbyist Jose Luis Castillo, Bell’s campaign manager, Friday morning and left a message.
Councilman Williams told Ladra said he spoke Friday morning to the voter who made the complaint, Brockington’s niece.
“They feel very violated. There are several voters in the household and they are supporters of mine. They have supported me for years,” Williams said.
“They misrepresented who they were,” he added, referring to the suspected campaign workers. “And then they ended up filling out the ballots. She told them she could fill out her own ballot and took it back from him. That’s when she saw it was filled out for Hodge and Bell and ‘no’ on the referendum.”
Brockington told Ladra that Brady had called her home on Monday and told her he was going to be in her neighborhood this week to help people with their absentees, asking if he could stop by. On Wednesday, she said, he called again and asked if she got her AB. She told him she did and he said he would come by later. The two men came by around 7:30 p.m., she said. “I remember it was dark because I had to turn the porch light on.”
Many local political observers had thought there would be a chill on AB fraud this election cycle after investigations into several claims of absentee ballot shenanigans in the last year, particularly in Hialeah, where two people were arrested on fraud charges. Sergio “Tio” Robaina, the uncle of former Hialeah Mayor Julio Robaina, and boletera Deisy Cabrera — who has been paid to work other campaigns — each received a year probation in plea deals that have left the community scratching their heads, particularly since the Cabrera case implicated a truckload of politicos, including Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez, State Sen. Rene Garcia, Hialeah Councilwoman Vivian Casals-Muñoz, Miami-Dade Commissioner Esteban Bovo and Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez-Rundle, who transferred the case to Broward after the media started inquiring about a possible conflict of interest: She and Gimenez shared the same campaign consultant, Al Lorenzo.
Police and prosecutors spoke to a third person handling absentee ballots — Anamary Pedrosa, an employee of Commissioner Bovo’s until she resigned in the midst of the scandal — but she was never charged, despite the fact that she had personally collected some 160 or so ballots and had delivered them to the post office herself. And the fact that she turns up on Bovo’s own campaign reports for “get-out-the-vote” efforts.
In a separate case, state authorities are investigating Congressman Joe Garcia‘s former chief of staff, Jeffrey Garcia, for a scam involving computer generated absentee ballot requests made without the voters’ knowledge or consent. And yet another separate case forced Miami Commissioner Francis Suarez to drop out of that city’s mayoral race after two of his campaign staffers pleaded no contest to charges that they illegally requested ABs for voters, although these had knowledge and had given consent.
This latest case — and it’s only Day 3 of absentee voting, dear readers — may implicate Lynda Bell, who last month became the target of a recall. But that would be if it ever gets that far.
First absentee ballot fraud claim arises — in Homestead race added by Ladra on
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