ABs start climbing: 5,270 returned in first week

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Absentee ballots for the August primary in Miami-Dade started to trickle in the very day they went out and the county has already mailed almost 143,000 of them to voters — indicating that we will very likely beat the 157,000 ABs requested this time two years ago.

But it could be even more by November, considering that today’s total is almost twice as many as the 84,000 ABs requested for the last August presidential primary in 2008.

The county’s Elections Department mailed 139,047 ABs on Tuesday — and got 74 back. Those were probably walk-ins. The next day, they mailed out an additional 2,775 and got only 36 back. The number of ABs requested then went down, with only 579 mailed on Thursday and 443 sent out Friday.

But that incoming number jumped in a big way by more than quadrupling to 149 on Thursday and a whopping spike to 5,008 on Friday, likely the first bunch returned from the first bunch sent Tuesday to the voters who are on a permanent AB list. That’s a total as of the first week of 5,267 ABs received already in elections headquarters. That’s almost as many as the entire 6,972 that were requested in a 30-day period ending July 13, according to an Elections Department spokeswoman Christina White. Whoa.

Expect more to start trickling in at a faster clip before it slows down again. Ditto for the requests. A bunch of campaigns will have the AB requests mailed back to them instead of the county department office, and then hold on to their absentee ballot requests to pace themselves and their “runners” for days, sometimes weeks. This is so they can concentrate on “the perms” that get the huge number of ballots first and then go after the new AB voters they generated afterwards. I think that’s illegal. And if it isn’t, it should be.

All candidates and political strategists work on three campaigns these days. The absentee ballot campaign, which is the first one started weeks ago, the early voting campaign and the Election Day campaign. And a lot of local elections can be and have been decided in the first leg of that race, which is why campaigns put so much effort into ABs.

In the county mayoral race, Commission Chairman Joe Martinez — who is the underdog to incumbent Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos “Golden Boy” Gimenez — has the experience of one-time Absentee Ballot Queen Sasha Tirador, whose ability and talents may be weaning as she loses more ground on the most important race she has this year. But while she seems to lose steam on the mayoral race, let’s remember that she is going to be collecting ABs for a number of people, including commission candidate Manny Machado, who is running against former State Rep. Juan Zapata for Martinez’s soon-to-be-vacant seat, Doral Councilman Luigi Boria‘s mayoral run and at least one judicial candidate, in addition to her two no-chance throw-in state House candidates. Ladra would say Sasha and her operation generate about a quarter of the AB requests in the next couple of weeks.

Another quarter or so might be the work of former Sen. Alex Diaz de la Portilla — who is not going to be Gimenez’s secret weapon like last year but is quite busy beating for ABs in his and his brother’s state races.

Still, Gimenez must be doing something to capture those all important mail-in ballots. I mean besides rubbing elbows with the like of Emelina Llanes and Victor Verjano in Hialeah, who used to run ballots for Tirador but were both seen one or both events celebrating Hialeah Mayor Carlos “Castro” Hernandez‘s endorsement of Gimenez.

Ladra will be watching the AB machinery crank it out and expects this year to break a record — again. All we need is another 14,000 or so ABs to be requested between now and Aug. 14. Three weeks for this AB-obsessed town is nada.