The Ending of a Recall

One of the many splendid “borrowed words” that makes English the conquistador of languages and a feeling in which I was practically swimming when “Mrs. Cruzchev’s” email hit my inbox last Saturday. I place the chairwoman’s name in quotes, of course, because she wrote that email like I wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Friends, Neighbors & Residents,

I am the Chair of The Recall Committee and a lifelong Coral Gables resident of 48 years. I signed the recall petition in front of multiple witnesses including the Coral Gables Clerk and the news media.

However, due to dirty tricks and a broken system created to favor politicians, my petition will not count.

Let me explain.

Supporters of Vince Lago, who opposed the recall effort, fraudulently signed my name to several petitions in order to sow chaos and create duplicates. This confusion would force the Elections Department to challenge all of the petitions including the one that I signed publicly in front of the Clerk.

This effort was wide-spread and intentional. The Lago supporter led scheme to de-legitimize valid petitions and undermine the will of the voters is yet another example of the deceitful nature of our Mayor.

While we have not received any official response from the Elections Department, they have made us aware of this scheme and that the actions of these dirty trickers may cause the effort to fall just short of the required number of un-challenged signatures needed. Adding insult to injury, Florida Statue does not provide a remedy or a method to deal with these fraudsters.

Here is what we do know.

• In under thirty days roughly 1600 Coral Gables residents signed valid petitions calling for the recall and removal of Mayor Vince Lago.

• Lago’s secret deals with a corrupt Coral Gables developer have broken the public trust in him.

• Lago’s intimidation and bullying tactics are now well known throughout the city.

• Our city’s Police and Fire Departments have publicly stated that Lago has undermined public safety through his words and actions placing residents at risk.

Even if the Mayor’s tactics undermine the recall process, this will not be the last you hear from those of us who are frustrated and embarrassed by our Mayor who we once supported.

Stay tuned and Thank You.

Maria Cruz

Notwithstanding Mrs. Cruzchev emerging as the Milli Vanilli of the recall effort, the self-abasing audacity on display in this email is enough to make one’s schadenfreude go supernova. But all glee aside, a few comments:

• Although I called your attention to Never End the Corruption’s lackluster showing only two posts ago, I stopped just short of predicting that they’d fail to hit 1,650 valid petitions. I have come to regret this in hindsight. At the time of writing, I was 99.9% sure they were doomed and should have said so. I’ve peeked under the hood of several much better organized recall/petition efforts in my day and seen 5-10% of petitions invalidated practically as a matter of course. I’m talking 5-10% even after the organizing committees performed their own quality-assurance checks on the petitions that led to thousands being internally discarded before anything was submitted to the clerk. You are free to take me to task the next time I hedge.

• Make no mistake, this petition effort was a miserable failure from the start. With 33,000 registered voters to work with, one should be able to collect 1,650 signatures to recall even Mother Teresa, especially after throwing a band of paid canvassers at it. The fact that End the Corruption needed every last second of 30 days to end up with only 1,533 signatures is nothing short of pathetic (186 fewer than what they submitted to the clerk). If any effort to recall either Ariel or Dr. Castro is made (which is a distinct possibility), mark my words, the organizing committee will obtain 1,650 signatures with weeks to spare.

• In addition to being the most moronic and shameful excuse for the recall’s failure imaginable, “we were sabotaged” is also the most quintessentially KFC. Flagrant scapegoating is the key to good demagoguery, after all. And you have to think that somewhere underneath the thick glob of delusion that holds their imaginary world together, there is some part of them that understands this. “Tricksters” can’t “de-legitimize [sic] valid petitions” by forging someone else’s name (these people don’t seem to know what “valid” means). That’s the point of having so many rules and protocols for a municipal recall. Every signature on every petition has to be witnessed. So the only universe in which faux-Cruzchev’s blame-shifting is remotely plausible is one in which 186 people tricked a witness into believing that they were the very recognizable chairwoman of the recall effort when they signed her name, and that no one within the organization noticed 186 petitions with the name “Maria Cruz” on it while sorting them. Yeah, ok. Every last petition was in End the Corruption’s control from beginning to end. They own the entire chain of custody. Therefore, End the Corruption is the only one to blame for End the Corruption’s troubles, which are far from over. Don’t forget, they are currently under FDLE investigation for using paid canvassers, which I can only assume they’ll blame Lago supporters for as well.

• KFC will emerge from this the biggest loser of all, particularly Kirk. That’s what happens when you make everything zero-sum and entirely about Lago. Every shot becomes a boomerang. Unless you are one of the three people who is as blind as they are credulous, you know very well that KFC gave rise to this recall—they were the gasoline to Bittel and Co’s match. The overwhelming revulsion with which the majority of residents responded to this stunt will linger until next April’s election, which is one of many reasons it was so foolish of Kirk to team up with Ariel and his puppet. He should have known to avoid forming an all-or-nothing alliance with two people on a different election cycle. Short of a recall, neither Ariel nor Dr. Castro has to answer to voters until 2027. They can afford to sustain self-inflicted wounds because they have ample time to heal—Kirk doesn’t. He failed to see that his own cost-benefit analysis is a lot less forgiving than his allies’, and so instead of prudently pushing back or triangulating, he suicidally marched head-first into every disgusting and politically costly battle his allies started. Rest assured, the last six months of KFC’s conduct would have looked significantly different (less reckless) if Ariel were up for reelection next April.

Resident evil

I’d be remiss if I ended without mentioning the second most delicious KFC communiqué to drop this weekend: Political Cortadito’s sour-grapes post on the ‘recall that wasn’t.’ It was pretty sloppy even by her standards, as it was riddled with so many typos that I am forced to assume she collaborated with one of her regular co-authors, i.e. Messrs. Walker, Daniels or Cuervo.

But that’s beside the point. What’s most amusing about her piece is the fact that a large chunk of it is devoted to a half-perplexed, half-disgusted repost of a message that was shared in a resident-led, charter-amendment-themed WhatsApp group by someone she thinks is me (I’ll keep that last part alive for the time being, as it seems like something I can have fun with down the line). She characterized this message, if not the group in general, as evidence of a “shadow government” that’s “trying to run the City Beautiful.”

A shadow government of residents utilizing a highly visible WhatsApp group with 70+ members to help organize a democratic initiative that would put a series of well-explored issues on an upcoming ballot so that all 33,000 registered voters can weigh in. Mhmm.

It’s hard to overstate how telling it is that one of KFC’s favorite mouthpieces is dumbstruck by citizens organizing in democratic defiance of her benefactors; that she can’t make sense of residents actually leading what is meant to be a resident-led effort. It beautifully illustrates the extent to which she and those like her have lost the plot. Perhaps instead of yelling “conspiracy!” at the mere sight of residents coalescing around a common cause, she should ask her paymasters why their recall didn’t feature the same.