Democrat Does Damage Control Congressman Garcia’s Staff Accused Of Ballot Fraud
Sunday, June 2, 2013 15:59
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What? Another Democrat accused of fraud surrounding absentee ballots. Surely you jest.
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Posted on Friday, 05.31.13
ELECTIONS
Congressman Joe Garcia’s chief of staff implicated in phantom absentee-ballot requests scheme
http://media.miamiherald.com/smedia/...MO5.St.56.jpeg Law Officers raided the home of John Estes, right, on Friday, May 31, 2013. Estes was the campaign manager for Joe Garcia, left, Democratic congressional candidate who won the seat.This photo was taken on September 27, 2012 in Miami. Joe Raedle / Getty Images
Related Content The case of the phantom ballots: an electoral whodunit
BY PATRICIA MAZZEI
PMAZZEI@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Congressman Joe Garcia’s chief of staff abruptly resigned Friday after being implicated in a sophisticated scheme to manipulate last year’s primary elections by submitting hundreds of fraudulent absentee-ballot requests.
Friday afternoon, Garcia said he had asked Jeffrey Garcia, no relation, for his resignation after the chief of staff — also the congressman’s top political strategist — took responsibility for the plot. Hours earlier, law enforcement investigators raided the homes of another of Joe Garcia’s employees and a former campaign aide in connection with an ongoing criminal investigation into the matter.
“I’m shocked and disappointed about this,” Garcia, who said he was unaware of the scheme, told The Miami Herald. “This is something that hit me from left field. Until today, I had no earthly idea this was going on.”
Jeffrey Garcia, 40, declined to comment. He also worked last year on the campaign of Democrat Patrick Murphy of Jupiter, who unseated tea-party Republican congressman Allen West. Murphy has not been implicated in the phantom-requests operation.
The Miami-Dade state attorney’s office, seeking electronic equipment such as computers, served search warrants Friday at the homes of Giancarlo Sopo, 30, Joe Garcia’s communications director; and John Estes, 26, his 2012 campaign manager. Neither Estes nor Sopo responded to requests for comment.
A third search warrant was also executed, though it wasn’t clear where.
Joe Garcia said he would likely put Sopo on administrative leave for the time being.
The raids marked a sign of significant progress in the probe that prosecutors reopened in February, after a Herald investigation found that hundreds of 2,552 fraudulent requests for the Aug. 14 primaries originated from Internet Protocol addresses in Miami. The bulk of the requests were masked by foreign IP addresses.
It is unclear if the requests from domestic and foreign IP addresses are related to the same operatives.
The Miami Herald found that the ballot requests were clustered and targeted Democratic voters in Garcia’s congressional district and Republican voters in two Florida House of Representatives districts, indicating a concerted effort by a mystery computer hacker or hackers.
Only voters, their immediate family members or their legal guardians can submit requests for absentee ballots under state election laws. Violations may be considered third-degree felony fraud. Using someone’s personal information — as required in online ballot-request forms — may also be considered a more serious, first-degree felony.
None of the identified requests were filled because the elections department’s software flagged them as suspicious. But had they slid by, campaigns would have been able to direct phone calls, fliers and home visits to the voters to try to win their support — if not attempt to steal the ballots from unsuspecting voters’ mailboxes.
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle said her office has targeted absentee voting, which she considers problematic, both through the criminal investigation and “active advocacy’’ seeking to change laws in Tallahassee and at County Hall.
“Historically, absentee voting is the source of all voter fraud,” she said in an interview, crediting The Miami Herald for its investigation.
Fernández Rundle convened a grand jury last year that reviewed policies for voting by mail and recommended that the elections department step up its security for online requests. County commissioners are scheduled to vote Tuesday on a resolution sponsored by Commissioner Esteban “Steve” Bovo directing administrators to implement the recommendation.
Friday’s searches raised the specter of another crime in the already scandal-plagued election for Congressional District 26, which extends from Kendall to Key West.
The Miami Herald found that the first batch of requests, which originated from at least two Miami-area IP addresses last July, targeted Miami-Dade Democratic voters in the congressional district where Garcia was running in the primary against Gustavo Marin, Gloria Romero Roses and Justin Lamar Sternad. Later batches using foreign IP addresses targeted Republican voters in the two Florida House districts.
Garcia won the primary and later defeated incumbent Republican David Rivera in the general election.
Though Garcia bested Rivera by about 11 percentage points, and Democratic President Barack Obama won the district by about seven points, Republicans still view Garcia as vulnerable. Three GOP challengers have already announced plans to run against him in 2014.
One of them, Miami-Dade School Board member Carlos Curbelo, pounced on Friday’s news.
“Joe Garcia has to come clean immediately and tell the public if his campaign is involved in absentee ballot fraud,” Curbelo said in a written statement.
Last year’s tumultuous primary resulted in a separate, federal corruption investigation into whether Rivera had ties to Sternad’s illegally funded primary campaign. Rivera has denied any wrongdoing.
Congressman Garcia said he will hire Coral Gables attorney William Barzee, a longtime campaign contributor, to investigate the phantom-ballot scheme internally and cooperate with prosecutors.
As communications director, Sopo received a salary of $12,744 between Jan. 17 and March 31, Garcia’s congressional office records show. He was not paid by Garcia’s campaign last year, though his company, GS Strategies, received $33,450 in 2010 when Garcia lost his congressional bid to Rivera. Sopo also worked on Garcia’s failed 2008 campaign against Republican U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart.
In 2012, Garcia’s campaign paid Estes $44,395 through his company, Estes Consulting. Between 2010 and 2011, he was paid $5,770 by the Florida Democratic Party.
A woman who would not give her name but identified herself as Estes’ mother answered the door at the family’s Westchester home Friday afternoon. She acknowledged that investigators had searched the house earlier in the day but said she did not know what they were looking for.
Neither Estes nor Sopo worked in the Republican primaries for Florida House districts 103 and 112, where voters were also targeted with the phantom absentee-ballot requests. It is unclear what, if any, involvement they could have had in those races.
District 103 stretches from Doral to Miramar; District 112 from Little Havana to Key Biscayne.
The Miami Herald found that 466 of 472 phantom requests in Congressional District 26 targeted Democrats. In House District 103, 864 of 871 requests targeted Republicans, as did 1,184 of 1,191 requests in House District 112.
During the primary, the campaign of Romero Roses, one of Garcia’s rivals, raised concerns about odd absentee-ballot requests in the race.
The phantom requests were first revealed in December by the grand jury examining absentee voting. Prosecutors said they could not track the hacker behind the requests because they were masked by 12 foreign IP addresses. But The Herald reported that they had not obtained information showing three additional domestic IP addresses as part of their initial inquiry, due to a miscommunication with the elections department.
A day after the Herald brought the domestic IP addresses to their attention in February, prosecutors said they would examine the ballot requests. At least two of the IP addresses were in Miami and could likely be tracked to the mystery hackers’ physical addresses.
Miami Herald staff writers Marc Caputo and Charles Rabin contributed to this report.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/05/3...e-garcias.html
Florida sounds like a political cesspool.
Posted on Wednesday, 02.26.14
Rivera named by Sternad in illegal money scandal
BY MARC CAPUTO
MCAPUTO@MIAMIHERALD.COM
For the first time, a convicted congressional candidate has stated in federal records that U.S. Rep. David Rivera was a part of the conspiracy to funnel illegal contributions to his campaign.
Justin Lamar Sternad said in three recent Federal Elections Commission filings that a total of $81,486.15 in illegal campaign contributions were coordinated or tied to “Ana Alliegro and/or David Rivera.”
The revelations about the two come nearly a year after Sternad’s March 15 guilty plea on counts of accepting illegal campaign contributions, conspiracy and making a false statement on an FEC report.
Sternad’s sentencing has been repeatedly delayed. He’s cooperating with federal investigators who are trying to bring charges against Rivera and Alliegro.
“To those who think this case has gone away: You’re wrong,” said Enrique “Rick” Yabor, a lawyer for Sternad, who last month amended three of his FEC reports to note the involvement of Alliegro and Rivera in his 2012 Democratic primary race for Congressional District 26.
Neither Alliegro nor Rivera — both of whom have denied involvement in the scam — could be reached.
Sternad has never publicly mentioned Rivera or Alliegro, but he has privately discussed them at length with federal investigators.
Sternad was busted by the FBI after The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald raised questions about his campaign finances and reports.
During the campaign, Sternad — political unknown with no experience and little money — was producing and mailing slick flyers that sophisticatedly targeted specific segments of the electorate in the district stretching from Key West to Calle Ocho in Miami-Dade County.
One mailer savaged fellow Democrat Joe Garcia over his divorce, echoing a line of attack espoused by Rivera, who was then the Republican incumbent. Sternad also admitted to using Alliegro as a de facto campaign manager — a strange choice for a Democrat considering her Republican background and close association with Rivera.
As the feds closed in, Alliegro fled to Nicaragua at one point, returned to Miami to talk to investigators last year, and then apparently left again, according to her Facebook page.
If Rivera were involved in the conspiracy, it indicates he wanted to use Sternad as a straw candidate to defeat Garcia in the primary or at least wound him before the 2012 elections. It didn’t work. Amid the scandal, Garcia walloped Rivera in the general election race and won the congressional seat.
Sternad amended his elections records once before to say the source of his political contributions were from an “unknown contributor.”
However, after months of fully cooperating with the FBI and a federal grand jury, Sternad now names names, listing 11 separate instances when money was steered to him over a period of months.
The alleged conspiracy began as early as May 25, 2012, with a $500 contribution.
“The contribution was given to me, in cash, by a third party from Ana Alliegro. I later discovered that Ana Alliegro was working with David Rivera,” Sternad wrote in an amended report that the FEC posted Jan. 30.
The identity of the “third party’ is unclear.
To make sure Sternad was able to get on the ballot, he said he was also given $5,000 on June 7, 2012.
“These funds were deposited into my bank account by a person unknown to me for the purposes of covering my qualification fee,” he wrote. “The deposit was coordinated by Ana Alliegro and/or David Rivera.”
When it came to the big payments to the mail house and printing companies that handled his mailers, Sternad also names “Ana Alliegro and/or David Rivera.”
http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/02/2...n-illegal.html