Throw out tainted ABs and we’d have a runoff

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So, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos “Golden Boy” Gimenez seems so proud of tainted his re-election victory with 54% of the vote in a race marked by the dark cloud of boleteros and possible absentee ballot fraud.

But you know what? If the ABs are tossed out — as they should be — there would be a runoff. A much-needed and deserved and fair runoff.

Look at the numbers. Yeah, Gimenez won overall in every race — absentee ballots, early voting and Election Day. But if you take out ABs, he didn’t win the 50% plus one majority and he eeked out over Commission Chairman Joe Martinez by a scant 107 votes. Absentees — which are now under question and have been the subject of several investigations and recent arrests — is the only place where Gimenez won real strong, with more than a 2 to 1 margin.

‘But if you throw all those out — after at least hundreds, and maybe thousands have been called into question — Gimenez is just under the 50% threshold.

In early voting, Gimenez got 17,260 votes, or almost 48 percent, compared to 13,407, or 37 percent, netted by Martinez — who has yet to concede as of Wednesday morning and was going out of town with his family for a few days. On Election Day, Gimenez got exactly 50 percent of the vote and Martinez got 32 percent. That means that at the end of the day, without ABs, Golden Boy Gimenez has less than 49.5 percent of the vote — and would be forced into a runoff Nov. 6, which would be a very good thing for Ladra, Miami-Dade voters and democracy as a whole.

Again, that amounts to only 107 votes over Martinez — and who knows how many of those were viejitos driven to the polls against their will and made to vote for someone, they just can’t recall exactly who. Really, too small a margin to call it.

Part of the reason Ladra is so deeply disappointed in the Golden Boy is because if he was a true, transparent leader — as I once believed heart and soul — Gimenez himself would demand the ABs be tossed and have the confidence and the guts to see if he gets elected in November. Heck, I might even vote for him then if he shows that much courage. After all, this is a man who used to rail against the lack of transparency and the widespread corruption we talked about last year during his post-recall, miracle election against frontrunner, former Hialeah Mayor Julio Robaina (whose machine worked for his old nemesis this time around. I know. It’s like a TV series!). And I can understand how people might doubt that Gimenez would actually get worked up about something, anything, but he used to grit his teeth — that’s how angry he’d get about this stuff last year when it worked against him, before he became parte de la rosca, part of the machinery.

Martinez has not decided if he will challenge the election in court, though he should. I wish I could, but you have to be a candidate.

“I will give it some thought,” the chairman told me Wednesday morning. “If it’s in the best interest of the community, I will. If not, then we have to live with the majority’s choice. Apparently, people don’t care about voter fraud.”

Um, some people do. Haven’t you noticed how the media won’t let up on this?

“Attorneys cost $$$$$$,” he texted, “which I don’t have. You have no idea how widespread this fraud is. I didn’t know how big it was until yesterday.”

When I called him back, he explained about an incident he had at a Pasteur Medical Center, something Ladra and others have heard about for years but that is difficult to prove

“I’m visiting people there and I didn’t know why we couldn’t get in for weeks and weeks and later on I find out you have to pay some guy to get in there. Well, when there were a couple of days left, we get in, we didn’t pay but they let us in. And I’m talking to this lady, helping her out with an STS issue,” Martinez said, referring to the county transportation service for elderly and disabled residents. “And she said, ‘You know, I was going to vote for you anyway but now even more. Magaly is coming to help me with the ballot and I will tell her.’ And before I could urge her not to let anyone help her with her ballot, Magaly was there in front of me with a list of all the names people had to vote for. Whoever was number 63 was there, [Miami-Dade State Attorney] Kathy Fernandez-Rundle, Gimenez.”

He said Channel 51 had gotten a picture of the list.

“These people control thousands of votes,” Martinez told me. “That’s widespread when you have corporations filling that for people, telling them how to vote.”

Some people do know about these things, though, chairman. Ladra and the vice president of the Hialeah Fire Union and the former Hialeah Police Chief and, actually, the Hialeah hoodlums who have been doing this for years, some of whom are named and some of whom are not, and the other type of manipulation — employees of small cities made to go out and vote for their mayor’s candidate because they all work for the city so their jobs could depend on it. Martinez would not get back on the phone with me to tell me what widespread fraud he found, but there’s tons of it going around. Some of us do know.

Apparently, not the mayor. Who is pretending to believe that none of this really matters, or at least it doesn’t matter in his race — his campaign tossing the blame, rightfully, to a state house race at the center of it (more on that later) — as if that makes it okay.

The chairman had stronger words Tuesday night when he said that his campaign “did not steal votes.” Ouch. That is a direct accusation to his incumbent’s camp.

But he is right. There are at least three or four or five proven cases of absentee ballots filled out by the ballot runners instead of the voters themselves — and that is too many — and two arrests associated with it. Both runners — former mayor Robaina’s uncle Sergio “El Tio” Robaina and Deisy Cabrera, who has worked for the likes of former Sen. Rudy Garcia, Sen. Rene Garcia and State Rep. Eddy Gonzalez. All of them endorsed the mayor and my point about the unholy alliance is that Gimenez should have known that boleteros would come with the package. Ladra is not smrater than the mayor. If I knew, he knew.

And if we know about those four or five or 200 or 1,500 stored at someone’s house — which is now just a rumor but is certainly not impossible in the scheme of things — how many more are invalid? We don’t know. And because we don’t know, they should all be thrown out. He agreed with me that the mayor should be the one to step up.

“It’s a very bad black eye on his victory. I would never want to win that way,” Martinez said.

The chairman has 10 days after the certification of the election, which is likely later this week, to file a challenge. “If I have to fight him, it costs money.” I told him I bet there are people in the community willing to help with that and am calling PBA President John Rivera to see if he has given any thought to getting an attorney to help the chairman challenge the election in court and raising funds to fight this corruption.

Fight this, John. Don’t fight a person. Let’s fight the corruption of democracy.

Ladra wants a runoff not only because it is the right thing to do after finding evidence of what could possibly be widespread abuse of the system, but also because the additional time would change the game plan and may force Golden Boy Gimenez to cut his tainted ties to the Hialeah hoodlums and their machinery. As it stands now, he can just sweep the whole thing under the run for his new unholy alliance buddies. You know, call it “old news” that is “in the past” and say he wants to start the process of “healing the community” — that crap.

But we won’t heal if the wound is just covered over without removing the infection. Which will erupt at the next election time.