Voters caught in Miami vice

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 16, 1998 | by James P. Lucier

In Miami-Dade County the dead walk, the absent return to vote in spirit, felons get reelected and an aide to Janet Reno rises to become deputy assistant secretary for public information.

Miami long since has supplanted Chicago as the epicenter of this nation's most colorful political life. It is the home of U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, where she once was state attorney. It also is the home of Kendall Coffey, the former Democratic U.S. attorney who resigned after an incident in the Lipstik Adult Entertainment club in which, after ordering a $900 bottle of champagne on a credit card, he bit one of the topless hostesses. In Miami, even Republicans are colorful, as evidenced by former Miami mayor Joe Carollo challenging the late Cuban-American leader Jorge Mas to a duel. He wasn't kidding.

In recent weeks Carollo has been in a duel of another sort with present mayor Xavier Suarez, fighting a last-ditch attempt in the courts to declare the mayoralty elections of last November null and void. Carollo has told Circuit Court Judge Thomas S. Wilson, Jr. that 225 absentee ballots were forged. It seems Carollo would have had the election locked up with 51 percent of the vote if Suarez, an independent, had not produced a last-minute flurry of absentee ballots, forcing a runoff.

In January, a grand jury found massive fraud among the absentee ballots resulting from a peculiar Florida law that allows party workers to round up absentee votes authenticated only by the signatures of witnesses. Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Rundle, a Democrat who was an assistant to Reno when Reno had the job, has been assiduous in sending out a phalanx of investigators, and the FBI has had its agents knocking on doors all over the city. Suarez stoutly maintains that there was no corruption in his campaign.

So whom did the savvy Carollo choose as his lead lawyer in a political environment dominated by Democrats? Why none other than the aforementioned Coffey, now a prosperous private attorney able to afford champagne tastes. If Carollo is reinstated or a new election is declared, Miami politics once more will be thrown onto a roller coaster of chaos and corruption. In recent years Miami has been more down than up, resulting in a $68 million shortfall in the budget, and the appointment by Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles last year of a financial-control board. The surrounding county, once called Dade, was renamed Miami-Dade County in a referendum last November in the same election now being challenged in the courts.

Under Florida law, a citizen who wishes to vote by absentee ballot must be a duly registered voter who requests a ballot by mail or asks that it be sent to his or her address. Party workers can bring the ballot to the voter, who punches it according to his or her choice, then seals it in an envelope and both sign across the sealed flap. The party worker then delivers the "witnessed" ballot to election officials. According to an investigation by the Miami Herald, this system resulted in massive abuses last November. One party worker delivered 90 ballots himself. Others canvassed nursing homes and insane asylums. Even more interesting, the dead rose to vote again and travelers to distant lands found out later that they somehow had voted without the formality of ever having requested a ballot.

The mayoralty elections are supposedly nonpartisan, even though party affiliations are well-known. So all of this frenetic activity by the Democratic establishment in a struggle between a Republican and an independent contrasts sharply with the laid-back attitude by the same establishment toward voter fraud in the 1993 mayoralty race in the city of Hialeah, also in Miami-Dade. That election eerily prefigured the Carollo-Suarez contest, except that the challenger, Nilo Juri, was a well-known Republican and incumbent Raul Martinez, in his third term, was the rising star of the Democrats. Martinez was counted in by 273 votes, which was all the more remarkable because, at the time of the election, he was a convicted felon sentenced to 10 years in prison for extortion and racketeering. (The conviction was reversed on appeal three years later) Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles refused to intervene, saying that the people had spoken, and allowed Martinez to be seated despite the mayor's conviction.

Juri refused to give up. He had held a slight edge in the polls going into the election, and he was the absolute winner among the machine-tallied ballots. But the Martinez organization had produced a 2-1 advantage in absentee ballots, and the same tactics currently at issue in the Carollo-Suarez Miami election were obvious in the Hialeah election. Juri pursued his case in court, and in 1994 Dade Circuit Court Judge Sidney Shapiro held that the election was affected by substantial fraud, threw out the absentee ballots, and ordered a new election.

More peculiar was the fact that Martinez's sister-in-law, Maria del Pilar "Lula" Rodriguez, was at that time the personal assistant to Reno at the Justice Department in Washington. Before joining her friend at Justice, she had been in charge of the Miami office of Democratic Sen. Bob Graham. Indeed, Rodriguez had taken a vacation from Justice at the time of the election to help out in her brother-in-law's campaign. Moreover, her signature as a witness was on 14 of the allegedly fraudulent absentee ballots. Thus not only did she, while an employee of the Department of Justice and personal assistant to the attorney general, participate in the election campaign of a convicted felon, but she is alleged to have been a participant in the election fraud.