People are still dumbfounded.
How could Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez, one of the few lawmakers who wanted to fix the broken Florida unemployment system, be ousted by a Latinas for Trump founder who has no political experience?
The answer is that Republicans put an NPA spoiler plantidate who was a GOP voter days before he qualified as a shill in this race. Alex Rodriguez even had the incumbent’s last name. Bonus! He got 6,377 votes based on that name mostly. He never campaigned. He never showed up to a single event. But he definitely impacted that race where Latinas For Trump founder Ileana Garcia won by a teeny tiny margin of 34 votes after an automatic recount.
Nobody even knew what Alex Rodriguez looked like before WPLG’s Glenna Milberg and Univision’s Erika Carillo started digging. Turns out, it’s all tied to Republican political operative Alex Alvarado, a onetime intern for former Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.
Read related: Florida Senate 37 gap grows to 31 votes, Jose Javier Rodriguez heads to recount
Among the evidence of foul play: A political action committee called Our Florida that pitched Alex Rodriguez as progressive to peel Democrat votes from J-Rod, located at the same Kendall strip mall where Miami Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla has his PAC. It has just one $370,000 donation from a non existing company and the same exact expense for printing mailers. The money goes in and it goes out. Nobody can find anybody associated with it. Dark money that came out of nowhere and went nowhere.
The money trail comes from a non-existing company called Proclivity with a post office box in a strip mall UPS store in Atlanta. But it ends at a printing company is apparently owned and/or operated by Alvarado’s parents.
The sheer brazenness of these tactics has gotten national attention. Earlier this week, Rodriguez was interviewed by Drew Griffin on CNN.
Griffin compares the Our Florida PAC in the District 37 race to The Truth, a similar PAC which got $180,000 from the same non-existing company and paid the same print shop for cookie cutter literature that casts other NPAS as progressive leaning, which means they won’t steal GOP votes. The PACs each got the money and spent the money from/in the same places — and on the same days. They are each run by two young women with no political experience or background. One of them is tied to Alvarado.
J-Rod has called for an investigation not because it will make a difference in his race, but because he doesn’t want it to happen again and again.
“I urge an investigation into the straw candidate propped up by Republicans in this election,” he said in a statement. “Confidence in future elections cannot be eroded.”
Pero se cae de la mata.
Some reports have claimed there is a State Attorney’s Investigation into Alex Rodriguez, not for being a shill candidate because, apparently, that is legal. But for perjury because he lied about his address in a sworn statement. He lives in Boca, not Palmetto Bay.
What about money laundering? Or foreign influence? How do we know where that money really came from?
But he’s not important. Alvarado — who is also tied to dark money in the Miami-Dade mayoral race — is who they need to go after to get to the mobsters who ran this long con in this and two other senate races with the exact same literature. Exact. It’s like he was begging to get caught.
In District 30, Celso Alfonso may not have made a difference. Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez won that seat handily, 56 to 43%. That’s a 28,000+ vote difference and Alfonso only got 3,639 votes. But the intention was the same.
And it almost worked in District 9, which covers Seminole County and part of Volusia County. Plantidate Jestine Iannotti, got more than two percent of the vote in a race settled by less than three percent. Democrat Patricia Sigman lost to Republican Jason Brodeur. There was another plantidate who took 3% in a race decided by 4% in House District 29.
Read related: Six mayors in his state senate district back incumbent Jose Javier Rodriguez
“It doesn’t matter how it impacted a particular race,” Sigman told WESH 2 News in Orlando. “What matters is, it’s deceptive, and it needs to be fixed going forward.”
Authorities cannot just shrug their shoulders and tell us to change the law, because that’s not going to happen as long as legislators can use it to their advantage. So law enforcement has to make it very, very difficult for these hoodlums to con voters.
That’s why we have public corruption units. For stuff like this. Not to grab some poor airport mechanic stealing a few gallons of gas. We need to aim higher. We need to grab the people who mess with the electoral system so they can steer millions of dollars to friends.
In this case, investigators need to turn over every disgusting rock and go after everybody they can, including the young ladies who ran the political action committees. Even if they can’t prosecute everyone, they should identify and expose them so that they can’t fool us again.
Because, you just know they’re going to try this again. It worked once already!
Jose Javier Rodriguez senate loss in rigged race must be investigated fully added by Ladra on
View all posts by Ladra →
