Tuesday night’s loss in Doral was double whammy for political consultant Sasha Tirador, who worked for both
incumbent Mayor Luigi Boria and council candidate Adriana Moyano, who both lost their runoff elections.
The victories by their opponents — JC Bermudez and Claudia Mariaca, respectively — was pretty solid, and that includes very comfy leads in absentee ballots.
Is the Absentee Ballot Queen losing her touch? Might she be dethroned? Or does her magic only work in Hialeah?
No, wait. There’s always Sweetwater, where she helped elect Mayor Orlando Lopez in 2015 after she left or was fired from the campaign of immediate past Mayor Jose M. Diaz.
Read related story: Voters replace Luigi Boria with first mayor, JC Bermudez
Boria was forced into a runoff Tuesday after he failed to get 50 percent plus one in the Nov. 8 election. He lost in every category — ABs, early voting and election day. In both rounds Nov. 8 and Tuesday. Although Boria was within 200 votes on Election Day this go-around, he was almost 1,000 short in early voting and exactly 1,100 under founding mayor J.C. Bermudez in absentees.
Bermudez won Tuesday with a whopping 67% after he got 1,181 more ABs than Boria. Moyano lost in ABs by a smaller margin of 343 votes, smaller even than the margin of 529 she lost in the ABs on Nov. 8.
But these are just the latest two in a string of losses for Tirador.
Let’s remember that Tirador also worked on the Raquel Regalado campaign. And, much to Ladra’s dismay, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez got way more ABs in their runoff last month than the former Miami-Dade School Board Member who could have and should have been our first female county mayor — — 147,885 to 118,754.
Even earlier this year, it looks like la reina lost every judicial race she worked on except one.
- Rosy Aponte lost in all three races — absentee, early voting and Election Day. But it’s worth noting that even after paying Tirador $16,000, according to campaign finance reports, for “consulting” and “community outreach,” she had fewer absentee ballot votes than the other two candidates in the first round. Her total ABs were 27,667. The guy who came in No. 2, Oscar Rodriguez-Fonts had almost 10,000 more and went on to win the runoff.
- Yoly Roberson, la enfermera, also lost all three races, but the margin was much closer in early voting and Election Day. Roberson, who paid Tirador more than $15,000 for consulting and “communication,” had 46,399 mail-in votes but was beaten by Robert Luck, whose AB count came in at 56,903.
- But her worse performance this year must be with Renee Gordon, who actually won early voting and Election Day tallies but lost so big in absentee ballots that she came in third and didn’t even make the runoff. We usually see this happen the other way around. Gordon got 19,863 absentee votes while the candidate with the next lowest got 25,842 and the eventually, Mark Blumstein, got 32,173 in round one. But maybe that’s because she only paid Sasha $6,400 for consulting and “grassroots.”
To be fair, each of these judicial race winners — Rodriguez-Fonts, Luck and Blumstein — hired election royalty of their own: Al Lorenzo, who was caught in the 2012 absentee ballot fraud investigation into the Carlos Gimenez campaign and has been working quietly behind the scenes since.
Maybe we should call him Al “Absentee Ballot King” Lorenzo?
Curiously, and notably, other members of the Gimenez 2012 team, Jesse Manzano and Dario Moreno, were spotted early Tuesday 
evening celebrating “the best team’s” win (pictured, left, in the bottom left corner of this picture posted on twitter). Could Lorenzo be part of that best team? After all, Lorenzo consulted for Frank Bolanos, who ran against Boria in 2012 and was endorsed by Bermudez. He’s not on Bermudez’s campaign reports. But that may not mean anything, because neither is Manzano, who was wearing a yellow Bermudez campaign t-shirt on Tuesday. Of course, as of this early Wednesday, Ladra does not know if Bermudez had a political action committee (but if Jesse is involved, he probably did).
And, hey, maybe they volunteered, ok?
Sasha Tirador may be losing her touch with absentee ballots added by Ladra on
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