Illegal candidate cards cut short to meet the law

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Voters who went to JFK Library in Hialeah Monday for early voting may have gotten a palm card that was shorter than it was over the weekend.

That’s because two of the candidates were cut from the bottom up.

“We got tired of them,” said State Rep. Eddy Gonzalez when Ladra asked why the two judicial  slate mates — Judge Ana Maria Pando and Andrea Wolfson, wife of Miami Beach Councilman Jonah Wolfson — were removed from the cards, which poll workers often chase down voters in order to hand out.

But he was just kidding.

Joking aside, they took the two attorneys off for legal reasons

Hialeah is famous for slating candidates together to cut costs of printing and poll working — collaborating with one another also to garner more support from each other. But it is apparently against Florida campaign finance rules to have partisan state races and non-partisan county judicial races on the same slate card. Someone must have brought it to the attention of Gonzalez — or State Rep. Jose Oliva, or wannabe State Rep. Manny Diaz, Jr., who but for a half day Sunday has been MIA from JFK. Both of them are still on the card with Gonzalez.

“We got a legal opinion from our attorney,” Gonzalez said. “There really isn’t case law on this specifically, but there are similar situations, and just to be sure, we took the two off.”

Our attorney is former State Rep. J.C. Planas and Ladra supposes our includes Oliva and Diaz, whose establishment support against School Board Member and former Rep. Renier Diaz de la Portilla has caused somewhat of a stir among the DLPs and most of the Miami-Dade delegation (more on that soon). But do the three of them have to proportionately pro-rate to pay for legal services out of their campaign accounts like they each paid for a fifth of that palm card?

And what do they do now that two-fifths of those candidates have been cut out? They reportedly paid for the materials, too, if one is to believe the disclaimers for each candidate in tiny writing at the bottom of each name.

Do Wolfson and Pando get their money back?

Or did they just get the short little cards with their lonely two names to hand out?

Planas called Ladra to clarify that Wolfson, who he also represents, did not pay for a fifth of that palmcard — despite the disclaimer on it. Because she didn’t know.

“Someone just put the logo on there,” Planas said. “Somebody who works for somebody who works for somebody. That kind of thing. And they sent it to print. Andrea Wolfson never authorized it, never gave money to pay for it, never had any knowledge about it.”

He says that because she could get in trouble. “Judicial laws are very arcane,” Planas said, adding that they change regularly and are sometimes contradictory. “You can’t have your sign on a truck with another candidate sign on it, for example. And we are being safe. My thinking was, if you can’t have it on a truck you can’t have it on paper.”

But the rules remind him of the famous line by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who, upon deciding a case regarding alleged obscenities in a Hollywood movie, said this about pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

Said Planas: “They can’t tell you what the violation is, but ‘We’ll let you know when we see it.'”