Because they can't win if they don't cheat - Part whatever

Also, here's your election fraud...

Prosecutors are now looking into Alex Rodriguez, the Miami Herald reported, and he has since retained a lawyer.

[...]

[José] Rodríguez, a lawyer and first-term senator who had previously served in the Florida House, pitched his existing work on climate-change issues and labor.

Alex Rodriguez, meanwhile, appeared to have no campaign at all. He did not attend candidate forums, had no website, and received only a $2,000 loan from himself, the Herald reported. When WPLG sought candidate headshots to use on TV, he failed to return the station’s calls.

[...]

Florida Senate President Wilton Simpson (R) and the Florida GOP’s senate campaign arm both denied involvement in Alex Rodriguez’s campaign or candidacy in a statement to the Herald. But some Florida Democrats say the details of Alex Rodriguez’s candidacy raise questions.

Under oath, Rodriguez listed his address on campaign documents as being in Palmetto Bay, Fla., according to WLTV, even though the station reported that he had in fact been living in a rented house in Boca Raton, more than 60 miles and several state Senate districts away.

  WAPo

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.

[...]

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.)

[...]

[F]ormer 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.

[...]

On June 10, 2020, Artiles gave him $2,000 in cash and went with him to the bank to open an account for his campaign, the affidavit said. A few days later, he visited Artiles at his home, where the former politician took $3,000 out of a safe and handed it over. On July, 4, Alex Rodriguez again visited Artiles, who gave him another $5,000 from his safe, according to the affidavit. Artiles also gave him access to his credit card information and paid his rent one month, police said.

[...]

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.

[...]

Both Artiles and Rodriguez were released on bond Thursday afternoon.

  WaPo

UPDATE: (from The Times)

The story of how Mr. Artiles plotted the scheme, according to the arrest documents, is a classic South Florida racket complete with the sale of a nonexistent Range Rover and wads of cash stored in a home safe.

But it leaves unanswered the questions of where the money for the scheme came from — the Republican Senate president said the party had nothing to do with it — and whether the funds were tied to secretive dark money that oozed through two other State Senate races last year. Republicans have controlled the state government for more than two decades.

[...]

South Florida has an ignominious history of political and electoral shenanigans, both high profile — fraud that was so rampant in a Miami mayoral election in 1997 that a judge threw out the results — and low rent, such as small-time brokers getting caught unlawfully harvesting absentee ballots.

In 2012, former Representative David Rivera, a Republican, was involved in a shadow campaign to try to hurt the electoral chances of his Democratic rival, Joe Garcia. The recruited candidate and Mr. Rivera’s ex-girlfriend, who acted as a go-between, wound up in jail. Mr. Rivera, who was never charged, last month was ordered to pay the Federal Election Commission a $456,000 fine.

On Thursday, Katherine Fernández Rundle, the state attorney for Miami-Dade County, a Democrat, noted that recruiting a sham candidate to deliberately influence an election was not illegal, unless the candidate was also secretly financed.

“Is it an attack on our democracy? Is it a dirty political trick?” she said. “Absolutely.”

  NYT

As an aside, this is a pet peeve of mine: people asking and answering their own question rather than just making a statement. As far as I recall, it was made popular by Donald Rumsfeld, W Bush's Secretary of State. At least that's when I first became aware of the habit, and it irritated then as much as it does now. Which, for some reason, makes me think of the habit of politicians making a point by "pointing" with their index knuckle, like they're flicking paint off an imaginary brush. I guess the idea is that it's impolite to point, but it just looks stupid. That affectation, I believe, was started by Bill Clinton.

Back to the story...

At the center of the latest scandal is Mr. Artiles (pronounced are-TEE-less), who before his arrest this week was perhaps best known in Tallahassee, the state’s capital, for resigning from the Senate in 2017, after he cursed at and used a racist slur before a group of Black lawmakers. His political committee had spent money on “consultants” who were models from Hooters and Playboy without any campaign experience.

[...]

The Miami Herald reported that Mr. Artiles had boasted about planting Mr. Rodriguez on the ballot to a crowd at an election night party held at an Irish pub in Seminole County.

[...]

Local reporters in Tallahassee, Orlando and Miami found that Mr. Rodriguez along with two mysterious under-the-radar candidates in two other Senate races, one in the Miami area and one in Seminole County, were all likely plants. (Results in the other races were not close.)

Politico Florida tied the three candidates to dark money from two political committees that had sent hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of attack fliers to voters during the campaign. The only donor reported was an entity that listed a UPS box in Atlanta as its mailing address. The committees amended their financial reports after Election Day, changing the source of the money to a different donor, this time in Colorado.

[...]

There was much distrust between Mr. Artiles and Mr. Rodriguez, who told investigators he thought Mr. Artiles would not come through with the money he had promised him. At one point, when Mr. Artiles was looking for a used Range Rover to buy his daughter, Mr. Rodriguez concocted a story about finding one in Jacksonville for $10,900. Mr. Artiles paid Mr. Rodriguez for the car, even though it did not exist.

No honor among thieves?

“Frank Artiles is not a lone wolf,” said William R. Barzee, a lawyer for Mr. Rodriguez. “Over half a million dollars was spent by political operatives working in the shadows to prop up ghost candidates in three separate Senate races, all in one cycle. This was a well-thought-out, calculated and coordinated plan to steal Senate seats throughout Florida.”

The “greatest beneficiary of these actions,” Mr. Barzee added, “is the Republican Party of Florida.”