Shocker:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... -election/
"When incumbent Democrat José Javier Rodríguez lost his Florida state senate seat to Republican challenger Ileana Garcia by just 32 votes in November, the losing party and investigators began asking questions about a suspicious third candidate.
A man named Alexis “Alex” Rodriguez — who shared the incumbent’s last name — appeared on the ballot but never campaigned, never spoke publicly, and could not be reached by reporters after he took thousands of votes on Election Day.
Now, the mysterious candidate and a former Republican state senator are facing felony charges for crimes stemming from a plot to “confuse voters and siphon votes from the incumbent,” police said in an affidavit filed this week.
“It violates everything that should be honest and straightforward about our elections,” Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle (D) said on Thursday, noting that investigators are still probing the case as well as two other suspicious candidates in other state races. “Where it goes from here, we don’t know. We have not completed this investigation.”
The case is a rare instance when a criminal scheme may have changed an election outcome, helping the GOP flip a state senate seat. The investigation comes as Republicans in Florida have justified attempts to restrict mail-in voting, which would hamper Democrats, by suggesting tighter rules will make elections more secure — even though there is scant evidence of voter fraud in mail-in ballots.
The scheme allegedly began on May 15, 2020, as a tight race for the 37th district’s state senate seat was shaping up between the incumbent Rodriguez and Garcia, the founder of Latinas for Trump who helped campaign for then-President Donald Trump. (Rundle said Garcia is not implicated in the case.)
Early that morning, former Florida state senator Frank Artiles (R) contacted Alex Rodriguez and asked for help with a “political matter,” the third-party candidate later told police.
The two men met at Artiles’s home in Palmetto Bay, Fla., that same day to discuss a deal in which Alex Rodriguez would run against the incumbent with the same last name in hopes that confused voters would accidentally choose the wrong candidate, according to the affidavit. In exchange, Artiles allegedly offered to pay him $50,000.
The alleged plan appeared to work. On Election Day, Alex Rodriguez won more than 6,000 votes without a campaign or name recognition, and many attributed the results to voter mix-ups between the two candidates with the same last name.
Artiles, 47, and Alex Rodriguez, 55, were arrested and charged on Thursday with three felonies for exceeding campaign contribution limits and providing false information to election officials.
Artiles, a Republican political operative, already had a reputation mired in controversy. He resigned from the state senate in 2017 following intense backlash after he berated two Black lawmakers in a Tallahassee bar in a rant peppered with obscenities and a racist slur, the Miami Herald reported. His political career was further marred after the Herald reported he had hired a Hooters “calendar girl” and a Playboy model to work for his political action committee, Veterans for Conservative Principles.
Alex Rodriguez, an auto-parts dealer who had known Artiles for more than 20 years, was experiencing “dire financial difficulties” when the political operative called him last May, according to police. When Artiles offered him an easy $50,000, he agreed to hear him out, police said.
“Artiles explained that the strategy was simple,” the affidavit said.
Artiles allegedly asked him to change his political party registration from Republican to unaffiliated. He prepared the paperwork and told Alex Rodriguez how to file for the 37th district senate seat, police said. Artiles allegedly instructed the sham candidate, who did not live in the Miami-area district, to use the address of a property in Palmetto Bay that Alex Rodriguez still owned, but no longer resided at, according to the affidavit. The former state senator also allegedly told him to periodically check his phone in case election officials tried to contact him.
Alex Rodriguez didn’t need to do anything else, because his mere presence on the ballot would confuse voters and give Garcia an edge in the race, according to police.
According to the affidavit, he agreed to participate in the plot out of financial desperation. His lawyer says Artiles took advantage of him.
“Frank Artiles and his co-conspirators knew they couldn’t beat José Javier Rodríguez in a fair election so they rigged it,” William Barzee, a lawyer for Alex Rodriguez, told the Herald on Thursday. “Artiles cynically targeted and used a vulnerable ‘friend’ with a great name to run in the race in order to confuse voters and steal the election.”
Damn you Coca Cola... damn you all to hell. 