Over the past few days, Miami Springs voters have received a flier urging them to vote by mail in the city's election on Tuesday. It includes a request form for an absentee ballot and an official-looking envelope. But the P.O. box on the envelope doesn't correspond to the county's department of elections. Instead, it belongs to a private company owned by Miami Springs Mayor Zavier Garcia.
Garcia's opponent calls the fliers "misleading." Garcia, however, says that he has done nothing wrong and that his critics are just trying to smear him ahead of the April 2 election.
Indeed, Joseph Centorino, executive director of Miami-Dade County's Ethics Commission, says there's no prohibition to candidates' recruiting voter registrations.
"There is no legal prohibition to what [Garcia] is doing," Centorino tells Riptide. "Granted, we are not promoting that people do this. People should think twice about whether they want to entrust a political campaign with information like this."
"Some people may criticize it... but it is not an illegal procedure," he concludes.
"If you're an average citizen, you would think that you were asking elections officials for an absentee ballot," she says. "But no. You're asking him [Garcia] for an absentee ballot... He is going to take those down [to the elections department], but that's not what it's about. It's about culling information."
Local gadfly Jim Llwellyn filed a complaint with Centerino over the mailers. "It would be pretty easy for him to take a ballot request and throw it in the trash if Garcia thinks the person is a Democrat," says Llwellyn. "It's ripe for manipulation, even if it doesn't cross the legal line."
Garcia counters that collecting the requests allows him to catch mistakes that the elections department might not, meaning that more -- not less -- people receive their absentee ballots in time to vote.
The mayor and his political consultant, David Custin, both say Ator is trying to smear Garcia.
"Obama's campaign got registrations this same way," Custin says. "This complaint has zero merit."
But Ator says the fliers are just the latest example of the "smoke and mirrors" Garcia employs to stay in office.
"He's the greatest campaigner in the world," she says. "Politics is what he does for a living."
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