Absentee Ballot Fraud in Southern Florida

In this year of endless talk about voter fraud, there is not all that much talk about one area of fraud that has actually been proven to exist, and to make a difference:  absentee ballot fraud. This kind of fraud even comes with its own profession, the absentee ballot broker (boletera in southern Florida).

Boleteras are hired by local campaigns to go into nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and sometimes homes to help people fill out absentee ballots. The question is, how much help do they give? A little help is a good deed, a lot of help is fraud.

According to two opinion pieces in the Miami Herald, one earlier this month and another today, as well as a Political Cortadito blog post, a Hialeah boletera was caught with twelve absentee ballots and charged with absentee-ballot fraud, involving the signature on one of the ballots, and two counts of violating a new county ordinance that makes it illegal for anyone to have more than two ballots belonging to other voters.

One of the exciting things about this sort of fraud is that, unlike the other kinds of fraud and attacks on fraud, this fraud, and the attacks on it, are bipartisan. One of the opinion pieces (by a Herald columnist) says that it is Republicans who are doing it, and the other, by a losing Republican candidate, blames his opponent for winning the election via the use of boleteras. In other words, this is the real thing.

But what can be done about it? The losing candidate wants to file suits challenging the absentee vote. The columnist wants to strengthen the laws, to make it harder for boleteras to operate. But what would this entail?

One thing would be to prevent payment to boleteras. If it's a civic project, why not have it be done by volunteers? And why should the volunteers work for campaigns, who have an interest in coercing and abusing the elderly to get more votes? Even volunteers can put pressure on the elderly and others who are open to persuasion or coercion, or simply don't know what's going on.

Perhaps what is required is volunteers who are selected and supervised by truly nonpartisan organizations, or volunteers who travel in pairs, each from a different party.

In addition, perhaps each nursing home or other facility could be required to make a list of individuals there who are clearly incapable of making a rational voting decision, due to dementia and other diseases. A boletera would be required to check all ballots they get signed against it before they leave the facility. They must discard the ballots of anyone on the list.

Enforcement is very difficult. In this case, according to a Miami Herald article last week, the investigation was done privately, paid for personally by a firefighter union leader. The investigator tipped off the police. This kind of enforcement politicizes the issue.

A law prohibiting anyone from having more than two ballots belonging to other voters makes enforcement easier, because there is no issue of coercion. However, such a law is a problem for people actually trying to help people vote, if they are on their way to post the ballots. Such a law throws out the baby with the bath water.

The other problem with such a law is that it places the principal onus on the boletera rather than the campaign that hired her. Here's a letter to the Herald this week that speaks to this issue:

The boleteras de Hialeah are certainly not without sin, yet they are scapegoats who have taken the heat for some self-righteous client-beneficiaries, who willingly bought tainted goods. They got caught doing what everyone knows is historically an established part of campaigning in Miami-Dade County.

Boleteras are everywhere, not exclusive to Hialeah politics or to people of Cuban descent. They go by other colloquial names depending on their ethnicity, where they live and operate.

They are usually well-known for their successful work and sought after by politicians and their operatives to do the bottom-of-the-barrel job it takes to scour for absentee ballots come every campaign season.

So long as the system allows this to happen, candidates will continue to appreciate the fruits of their labor. That is, until the boleteras get caught; then the usual games begin. Everyone is shocked, arrests are made and boleteras are expected to sing like canaries and bring the big fish down.

The whole show is hypocritical. The ones who should be arrested are those who used these vulnerable women for their own gain — only to throw them under the bus. —Mikki Canton, Coral Gables

This is not a tempest in a teapot. According to another Herald article, one third of the votes in this month's Miami-Dade County primary election were done via absentee ballot. And they made a difference. For example, in the county property appraiser race, one candidate received more votes in early voting and on election day, and yet lost the race due to his opponent's lead of more than 7,700 absentee votes.

This is where the real local voting problems are. The other "fraud" is more about preventing voting than about improper voting.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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