Absentee ballot fraud alert: Sweetwater elections approach

Interim Commissioner Maroño was appointed  to fill in a vacant seat left by the late Vice Mayor Ariel J. Abelairas last year after he passed away in late 2011. The mayor’s mama seemed like an odd choice, especially when there were other candidates that people had… oh, I don’t know… actually voted for in the last election.

But it’s not like Mama Maroño was a political neophyte. Isolina Maroño is well known in political circles and has reportedly worked as a boletera, or someone who deals in absentee ballots, for years. Whether she is a runner or a broker who hires runners, and she is likely both in a small city like Sweetwater, I am not sure. But what is known talked about widely is that she corners the AB market in Sweetwater.

Campaign reports show that Sen. Rene Garcia paid Mama Marono — among a few other known boleteras, including Hialeah’s arrested Daisy Cabrera — $1,050 in his 2010 campaign. State Rep. Frank Artiles (R-South Dade) paid her $1,000 in the same year. It was a good year. That August, Isolina Maroño got $1,500 from Gov. Rick Scott‘s campaign work — the same day three other members of her family got a total of $480 for the same “contract work.”

The commissioner volunteered to Ladra that she also did the same work for former State Sen. Rudy Garcia, when he ran for Hialeah mayor, and State Rep. Carlos Trujillo (R-Doral), even though I could not find her in the campaign report. Still, his opponent, perennial candidate and radio personality Paul Crespo, had hinted last year that she was collecting ballots for Trujillo. While the two came close with in-person votes (early voting got Crespo 172 and Trujillo 196 and Election Day saw 576 votes go to Crespo and 733 to Trujillo), the absentee ballots turned in showed that Trujillo had beaten Crespo by almost twice as many (1,348 to Crespo’s 677.

“But I am not a boletera,” Maroño told Ladra Monday.

Then what do these people pay her for? Why, her recommendation, apparently. But of course!

“Because I have been here a long time, because I have a track record in the community, I can recommend them to people who ask me,” she said. “On Election Day, I am at the polls all day, and when someone doesn’t know who to vote for, I tell them who I supported and they can vote for that person.

So the “campaign work” or “consulting” or “contract work” she does is really just about referrals? Really?

“I am not a boletera,” Maroño repeated to me. “But everytime someone calls me because they need help with the ballot, I help them.”

That’s not what her challenger, former Community Council Member Deborah Centeno, says. Centeno, who hopes to be the first Nicaraguan elected to the city with the densest population of Nicaraguans in Miami-Dade admits to being concerned by the councilwoman’s alleged “help” with ABs. Several voters have told her that they give the Commissioner Marono their ballot or that someone in their building takes care of it. The patient advocate at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute went to the senior center Tuesday and begged the voters there to cast their ballots themselves and not let anyone touch them.

After being annexed into the city because she was lucky enough to live between the old Sweetwater and Dolphin Mall, Centeno ran unsuccessfully two years ago against Prisca Barretto. Yeah, Prisca Barretto! I know. She was elected in 1993 and was a councilwoman when Ladra was a puppy and first started working for the Herald. I also covered the mayor’s first election to councilman when now Miami-Dade Commissioner Jose “Pepe” Diaz was mayor.  He seems to be the only one who got out. Because even Commissioner Manuel Duasso is there.

I’m telling you — reigns.

Anyway, Barretto won with 44 percent of the vote to Centeno’s 17 percent.But the gap was much wider in ABs, where Barretto got 561 votes to 160 than it was on Election Day, when Centeno got closer to her with 128 to her 183 votes.

There were also two other candidates and one of them, Elsa Thompson, works for the city and is considered by some to have been a plantidate that took votes from Centeno. She garnered 26 percent of the vote, which means it may have been closer without her.

And while Ladra has nothing agaisnt Maroño — in fact, I love it when my mami comes to work with me — I like what Centeno has to say. Maroño wants to keep things as they are. She believes the city is just fine.

Centeno wants more transparency and to modernize the website. Ladra thinks that campaign finance reports online would be nice.

She wants more professionalism. “Right now, the city is being run like a grocery store,” Centeno said, and she should know since her family owns a bakery in the city.

While the Miami-Dade County Ethics Commission has ruled that there is no conflict of interest with the mother and son serving in office — particularly because Marono is a strong mayor who does not vote and so he can have conversations outside the Sunshine Law — Centeno also wants to see rules about nepotism.

Something the mayor might not like, since his wife, Jennifer Maroño, also works for the city as a special projects manager and his uncle Antero Espinosa works as the director of the maintenance department

And, get this, Centeno also wants to introduce term limits — in a city where politicians reign for decades.