Updated: The Take Back Our City group that wants to recall Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo submitted more than 1,900 signed petitions to the city clerk just before midnight Saturday after they were informed by the city on Friday that Saturday was the deadline.
“We emailed them a drop box link then told them we would take the hard copies at 8 a.m. Monday morning,” attorney JC Planas 
told Ladra Sunday afternoon. Why do it that way? Because the Miami-Dade County Elections department — which City Clerk Todd Hannon must deliver the petitions to immediately — is not open until Monday.
And there was no way organizers wanted that box sitting at the city clerk’s office over the weekend for anyone (read: Carollo) to see. Or manipulate. Or lose. Or take notes on. Can’t you just imagine an angry Crazy Joe knocking on petition signers’ doors on Sunday?
“I trust Todd implicitly,” Planas said, “But there are other shady people at City Hall.”
No kidding. Especially after the way the group was pressured to submit the signatures sooner than expected.
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On Friday, just a little after a city activist said over the radio that the group was ready to turn in petitions on Monday, Planas got 
a call from Hannon saying his office would stay open Saturday so they could turn in the signatures then.
“He said that,” Planas said, “but we weren’t going to give up our constitutional right to have the entire day. We don’t even believe that yesterday was the submission deadline. That’s arbitrary.”
Planas says the state statute allows for petitions to be submitted at any time but signatures must be collected within a 30 day window. So even if they went on with the effort, they only would have had to hold back the first signatures that were outside the 30 days — and everybody knows those would be easy enough to come back to.
The attorney explained all this to Hannon in a cover letter that accompanied the drop box with the scanned files. “Miami-Dade will easily be able to verify that all petitions presented correspond with the copies we have provided you in the drop box,” he wrote. “Additionally, please note that the statute does NOT provide for the petitions to be copied or scanned by the city prior to their submission to the county elections department.
“While we are providing the drop box link as a courtesy to the city, the operation of the statute generally implies that the Elections Department would provide you the copies upon there receipt. We trust that your office will follow the statute and immediately seal the petitions and submit them to the Supervisor of Elections Monday morning.”
Organizers were confident they had enough valid signatures — after weeding out a couple hundred for one reason or another — and started scanning and copying 1,914 petitions at the Ponce de Leon FedEx copy center in Coral Gables almost until the midnight deadline. It was a kinda crazy, all hands on deck kind of thing.
They wanted to get 2,000, but 1,914 signatures still gives them a comfy cushion to get just over the 5% of registered voters or just over 1,500 that they need. Even if 10% are invalidated — which is high — they will still have close to 1,700.
That’s mostly thanks to Emiliano Antunez of Dark Horse Strategies, who came into the game two weeks late and still helped collect the vast majority of the petitions, more than 1,000 in 14 days.
Some of those might have been collected on Friday night at Carollo’s own event — where petitioners danced around in Recall Joe t-shirts with Recall Joe signs as Carollo and his cronies recorded and intimidated them. Someone from the stage of this taxpayer paid event even shouted “Caballero, cuidado lo que firman.” Or “People, be careful what you sign.”
Chilling, indeed. There are videos of the volunteers being intimidated by Mary Lugo, a Bayfront Trust board member and Carollo ally, at the event on Al Crespo’s blog. No se lo pierdan.
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No wonder the group didn’t want to hand in the hard copies — which, of course, will match exactly to the scanned copies in the 
electronic drop box — until Monday morning. “And we will follow en caravana to the county elections department,” Planas said.
Ladra wants to join that happy parade!
But wait. As sure as the sun does shine on Florida, there will be a legal challenge. Everyone expects litigious Joe Carollo to sue on whatever technicality he can. He has already gone on radio to say the volunteers are paid. Even if they are, any prohibition can be a violation of constitutional rights.
Because you can pay to collect petitions to qualify to run for office. You can pay to collect petitions for a referendum to be put on the ballot. But you can’t pay petitioners for a recall effort? Seems like a violation of our rights. Guess who wrote that law? Lawmakers who can be recalled. It won’t stand muster in court. And there’s precedent.
That doesn’t mean, however, that Carollo won’t try. Everyone just expects him to challenge it. He loves going to court.
City Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla, Carollo’s strongest ally who has paid for the anti-recall commercials on TV, texted Ladra — unsolicited on Sunday to boast that the recall had failed.
“As I expected, the malcontents fell short. Now we can move on and do the people’s work,” he texted. “They missed the deadline.”
So that might be their angle — that the law doesn’t allow for the submission to be before midnight, even though Ladra heard that Hannon was waiting at his office until 8 p.m. Saturday. So 8 p.m. is okay but midnight isn’t? Who says when the deadline is? A judge will have to.
Read related: Miami owes $120K in legal fees from Crazy Joe Carollo’s lawsuit
“I expect Joe Carollo to sue, but I would find it highly improper and a violation of ethics if the city attorney or the city were to get 
involved,” Planas said. “Per the statute, they clearly have no standing in this situation.”
Why would that stop them? There is widespread belief that the city clerk first got a call from City Attorney Victoria Mendez telling him when the deadline was for the petitions. In fact, Planas refers to it in his cover letter to Hannon with the petitions.
“We disagree on the artificial timetable for the turn-in of the petitions that your City Attorney seemed to intimate,” Planas said.
So why is Mendez acting (again) like Carollo’s personal attorney. That would be Ben Keuhne‘s job, not hers. Especially if she is going against residents of the city to make that opinion on his behalf. Wouldn’t that already be a violation of statutes and ethics? Is anybody at the Florida Bar watching?
Ladra hopes Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor Christina White was blind copied the email and drop box, too. Por si las moscas.
Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo recall signatures submitted for Round 1 added by Ladra on
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