Florida votes in question again with Miami absentee ballot scandal
Deisy Cabrera, right, is met by state attorney investigators, left, with her attorney, Eric Castillo, center, outside the State Attorney’s Office in Miami Thursday, Aug. 2, 2012. Cabrera was arrested for suspected absentee ballot fraud after authorities say she collected at least 31 ballots under suspicious circumstances. (AP Photo/The Miami Herald, Tim Chapman)
Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez, shows ID and his voters registration card as he votes at Precinct 635, in Miami, Fla.,Tuesday Aug. 14, 2012. He is running against long-time commissioner Joe Martinez. (AP Photo/The Miami Herald, Tim Chapman)
Otto Fernandez casts his vote during the Florida Primary elections in Hialeah, Fla., Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2012. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz)
By Elaine de VallePolitics Posted on August 14, 2012
Voters in South Florida are going to the polls today to vote for their Miami-Dade mayor, state attorney, county commissioners, several state legislators and even the primary candidates for some Congressional races.
But the winners may have already been decided through about 90,000 absentee ballots that are now tainted by a scandal that has burst open the longtime rumored stealing of absentee votes, mostly from the frail and elderly, that has plagued South Florida for decades.
And it has caused some concern that campaign operatives in the November presidential election will use the absentee ballot machinery – normally controlled by the Republicans in South Florida – and once again raise doubt about Florida’s vote.
The validity of at least 200 ABs and possibly thousands more in today’s election is under question after several arrests in the last few weeks on charges of electoral fraud after people were caught collecting multiple ballots in their possession, which is against county law.
Daisy Cabrera, a longtime fixture of political campaigns who has worked for state senators, that are now going to have to answer for this, was nabbed by the Miami-Dade Police Public Corruption Unit on July 25. She was caught with 31 ballots but had been video taped the day before mailing some others that she had picked up at the post office.
Prosecutors are also talking to Anamary Pedrosa, the 25-year-old secretary of Miami-Dade Commissioner Esteban Bovo, an aspiring law student who is cooperating with police so she is not charged with delivering 164 ballots – taken to the commissioner’s district office – to the same post office as Cabrera.
Sergio “El Tio” Robaina, the uncle of former Hialeah Mayor Julio Robaina was arrested last week and charged with two felony counts of voter fraud.
But this is the tip of the iceberg. Those who know about the absentee ballot fraud and rampant exploitation of thousands of seniors who live in the public housing units of Hialeah and Miami know that this has been going on for years.
Last year, there were complaints about the AB tactics used by Robaina’s campaign against then county commissioner Carlos Gimenez, who ultimately beat him to become mayor. This time, however, Gimenez may be smeared by the AB scandal as Cabrera, Robaina and Bovo are all supporting his re-election.
And the dominos promise to keep dropping. All three of those questioned by police so far have ties, in two of the three cases over more than a decade, with the political establishment in Hialeah and have been paid from multiple campaigns.
Sergio Robaina told police defiantly that he had been helping seniors with their ballots for years and would continue to do so.
His nephew — whose net worth rose from $800,000 to more than $8 million during six years in office — benefited greatly from absentee ballot drives.
So did his chosen slate mates. In his first election in 2006, Julio Robaina got a little more than 3,000 absentee ballots. By 2009, that number had jumped threefold to nearly 10,000.
In between was the 2008 Congressional race, ultimately won by former U.S. Congressman Lincoln Diaz Balart, whose campaign was investigated by the state attorney’s office after absentee ballot fraud accusations surfaced.
It was one of several investigations that centered around a political consultant called the “Absentee Ballot Queen” named Sasha Tirador, but ended, as most do, without an ability to move forward with evidence.
“While the circumstances provide ample basis for suspicion of illegal or improper activity in connection with the handling of absentee ballots by someone associated with the Diaz-Balart campaign, any chance of proving a crime is remote,” wrote Miami-Dade Assistant State Attorney Joseph Centorino, in the close-out memo in 2010.
Diaz-Balart last week commented on the absentee ballot fraud scandal going on in his home base and admitted to having benefited from the process.
But, he said, the manipulation of ballots had become so rampant and the doubt so deep that there was only one thing to do — go back to the days when only the military and the very infirm or out of town could vote by mail, which has become the convenient moniker. “Vote by Mail.”
“I can’t think of any country except this one where absentee ballots voting by mail is acceptable,” Diaz-Balart told VOXXI as he sat at Chico’s Restaurant last week, endorsing another candidate on the ballot.
“Obviously it’s a really and I’ve done very well with absentees. But they’re not controllable. Even though they’ve always been a part of the process here and we can work with them within the system, I can’t imagine how absentee ballots can be good for democracy.”
Centorino, who has since moved on to be the director of the Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics and Public Trust, has repeatedly said that prosecuting absentee ballot fraud is frustrating because what they need is someone to come forward and provide testimony.
“Do we believe that there is absentee ballot fraud happening? Absolutely,” Centorino said last year when he was still at the State Attorney’s office. “Can we prove it? That’s another matter.”
Miami-Dade State Attorney Kathy Fernandez-Rundle recused herself from the Deisy Cabrera case after it came to her attention — a week after it came to her attention — that the boletera was connected to her own campaign consultant, Al Lorenzo.
Mitt Romney discussing Medicare last week. The $716 billion that he promises to restore to the program would be for higher payments to care providers, not for recipients’ benefits.
While Republicans have raised legitimate questions about the long-term feasibility of the reimbursement cuts, analysts say, to restore them in the short term would immediately add hundreds of dollars a year to out-of-pocket Medicare expenses for beneficiaries. That would violate Mr. Romney’s vow that neither current beneficiaries nor Americans within 10 years of eligibility would be affected by his proposal to shift Medicare to a voucherlike system in which recipients are given a lump sum to buy coverage from competing insurers.
For those reasons, Henry J. Aaron, an economist and a longtime health policy analyst at the Brookings Institution and the Institute of Medicine, called Mr. Romney’s vow to repeal the savings “both puzzling and bogus at the same time.”
Marilyn Moon, vice president and director of the health program at the American Institutes for Research, calculated that restoring the $716 billion in Medicare savings would increase premiums and co-payments for beneficiaries by $342 a year on average over the next decade; in 2022, the average increase would be $577.
Beneficiaries, through their premiums and co-payments, share the cost of Medicare with the government. If Medicare’s costs increase — for instance, by raising payments to health care providers — so, too, do beneficiaries’ contributions.
And those costs would be on top of the costs involved with a full repeal of the health care law, which would eliminate expanded coverage of prescription drugs, free wellness care and preventive checkups.
“One can only wonder what’s going on inside their headquarters in Boston and among their policy people,” said John McDonough, the director of the Center for Public Health Leadership at Harvard. “But there are only two explanations: Either they don’t understand how the program works, which is hard to imagine, or there is some deliberate misrepresentation here because they know how politically potent this charge is.”
The potency of the Republicans’ charge was evident in the 2010 midterm elections, when they accused Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats of cutting Medicare by $500 billion to pay for new coverage under the health care law. They went on to recapture control of the House.
Led by Mr. Romney, Republicans revived that line of attack for 2012. But Mr. Romney cited a higher $716 billion in the same week that he announced his selection of Mr. Ryan, who had supported the reductions until joining the Republican ticket. The different dollar figures reflect a shifting time frame: $500 billion represented the projected Medicare savings in the decade after the 2010 health care law was enacted; $716 billion reflects savings from 2013 through 2022.
The Romney campaign adamantly disputes the critics’ assertions.
“The idea that restoring funding to Medicare could somehow hasten its bankruptcy is on its face absurd,” said Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for the Romney campaign. She added, “Governor Romney’s plan is to repeal Obamacare and replace it with patient-centered reforms that control cost throughout the health care system and extend the solvency of Medicare.”
What Mr. Romney proposes to restore to Medicare, however, is not money but additional costs, for higher payments to hospitals, insurers and other care providers. Lobbying groups representing some care providers accepted those reductions during the health care debate, and in exchange they got the law’s mandate for nearly all individuals to have insurance, which meant that providers and insurers would have millions of new paying patients and policyholders.
But Mr. Romney’s policy director, Lanhee Chen, argued in a memorandum last weekend that reducing provider payments would backfire and hurt beneficiaries — a concern about the health care law, known as the Affordable Care Act, that is widely shared.
“In the real world,” he wrote, “the result will be fewer providers accepting Medicare payments and worse care for today’s seniors.”
Mr. Chen cited recent annual reports from the trustees for the Medicare program and from the chief actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Richard S. Foster. The trustees and the actuary each said that the law could well lead to significant savings in the delivery of health care, but both also suggested that over time the scheduled cuts to providers’ payments could prove unrealistic.
“While the Affordable Care Act makes important changes to the Medicare program and substantially improves its financial outlook, there is a strong likelihood that certain of these changes will not be viable in the long range,” Mr. Foster wrote.
He added, “The best available evidence indicates that most health care providers cannot improve their productivity to this degree — or even approach such a level — as a result of the labor-intensive nature of these services.”
Mr. Romney has been especially critical of the cuts for insurance companies that provide Medicare Advantage, a popular private-policy alternative to Medicare. “This is the president’s plan: $716 billion cut, four million people losing Medicare Advantage and 15 percent of hospitals and nursing homes not accepting Medicare patients,” he said in a recent campaign appearance.
But Medicare Advantage, which was created 15 years ago in the hope that private-market competition for beneficiaries would result in lower prices, has consistently cost more than standard Medicare — costs that Medicare beneficiaries must help subsidize through their premiums.
The reductions for Medicare Advantage providers are “a matter of basic fairness because they’ve been overpaid for years,” Ms. Moon said. As for beneficiaries, she added, “they’re guaranteed basic Medicare benefits. They may lose some extra benefits they may have been getting, but in effect you’re saying some of the windfall benefits may go away.”
“The bottom line,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, which Mr. Ryan leads, “is that Romney is proposing to take more money from seniors in higher premiums and co-pays and hand it over to private insurance companies and other providers in the Medicare system.”
A version of this article appeared in print on August 22, 2012, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Patients Would Pay More if Romney Restores Medicare Savings, Analysts Say.
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