Dark Money in Florida Politics Highlights where Professor Levinson was Right

Guest Blogger

This post was prepared for a roundtable on Voting Rights, convened as part of LevinsonFest 2022—a year-long series gathering scholars from diverse disciplines and viewpoints to reflect on Sandy Levinson’s influential work in constitutional law.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy

“There is no such thing as a perfect electoral system, any more than there is a perfect political society.” said Professor Sandy Levinson on November 7, 2016. But surely we can do better than what has happened recently in Florida elections with dark money funding bogus candidates to trick voters.

Because of Florida’s most famous resident, a petulant ex-president with a mounting list of legal problems, the press has largely missed a slowly unraveling scandal in Florida’s state elections. The local press has dubbed this the ghost candidate scandal.

The scandal broke through after the 2020 election, when Republicans in the state got caught running bogus no-party-affiliated candidates to help the election of certain Republicans, especially in the Florida Senate. But the practice of running these fake/bogus/insincere/charlatan/ghost candidates happened in the 2018 election too. It’s possible this underhanded practice goes back even earlier.

This may partially explain why the Florida legislature is so tilted towards Republicans when the Florida voting population is nearly evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. According to Pew in 2020: “Democrats and Republicans now make up similar shares of Florida’s registered voters (37% and 36%, respectively)[.]” In the Florida legislature 23 of 40 senate seats are held by Republicans and 76 of 120 house seats are held by Republicans.

The press spotted ghost candidates in three different Florida Senate Districts in 2020: Alex Rodriguez in district 37, Jestine Iannotti in district 9 and Celso Alfonso in district 39. In all three districts, the Republican candidates ended up winning.

Prosecutors have indicted several individuals including two of the ghost candidates themselves: Rodriguez and Iannotti. Iannotti has pleaded not guilty. Rodriguez entered a plea agreement and pled guilty to his role in the scam.

Meanwhile, Ben Paris, Seminole County GOP Chair and ex-Longwood mayor was found guilty in ghost candidate scheme for aiding ghost candidate Iannotti on September 1, 2022. Still awaiting trial are ghost candidate Iannotti as well as ex-State Senator Frank Artilles who stands accused of bribing Alex Rodriguez to be a ghost candidate.

Thousands of voters in each of the impacted Florida senate districts were tricked into voting for the ghost candidates after hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of mailers were sent to Democratic voters urging them to vote for the non-party affiliated Iannotti, Rodriguez and Alfonso. The mailers for Iannotti and Rodriguez were identical save the candidates name and featured a stock photo of an attractive black woman. Neither Iannotti nor Rodriguez are black.

It’s arguable that the votes for ghost candidates in Districts 9 and 39 didn’t matter electorally. But the race in District 37 with sound-alike candidate Alex Rodriguez seemingly did make a difference in his race against democratic incumbent José Javier Rodríguez. The Republican in that race won by 32 votes. The “shill” candidate Alex Rodrig­uez siphoned off 6,382 votes.

The local press has traced the money for the ghost candidates to Florida Power and Light (FPL) after a whistle blower for a dark money group called Matrix started feeding troves of secret documents to Florida media outlets. Florida Power and Light is large electricity utility company. Florida Power and Light is also a subsidiary of a publicly traded company called Next Era Energy (ticker NYSE: NEE).

If the revelations out of 2020 weren’t troubling enough, the press has also found that FPL/NextEra did the same damn thing in 2018. According to the Miami Herald, they secretly backed no-party-affiliated candidate Charles Goston to help unseat a FPL/NextEra critic in the state legislature.

The public only knows all of this because a disgruntled employee of a dark money group is telling the press what happened. As Professor Levinson once said, “money shouts in elections.” But voters need to be clear exactly who is doing the shouting.

Florida, like many states, needs better transparency laws for campaign finance that capture money flowing through dark money conduits into the political system. Had the mailers pushing the ghost candidates said “sponsored by Florida Power and Light,” voters might have thought of them far more skeptically than the scrappy effort of an independent candidate that they appeared to be.

Professor Levinson cogently pointed to two types of corruption potentially caused by money in politics: “individual candidates may sell themselves to the highest bidders. The other is systemic: the inequality of funds among candidates means that the well-funded can buy much greater access to the public forum than can the poorly funded.” In the case of the three Republican candidates who won, who knows how much they are beholden to FPL/Next Era. But FPL/Next Era has certainly been lobbying to stall the adoption of roof top solar which would make Floridians less dependent on their expensive service. And they recently raised the cost of electricity in Florida.

In 2020, the ghost candidates appeared as 11^th hour October surprises. This could happen again in this year’s election where Florida is electing its legislature and its governor.

Until Florida fixes its lack of transparency of money in politics, voters need to beware that voting for candidates that parachute into a race at the last minute on the non-party affiliated line could be the latest participant in a cynical vote siphoning scheme. Voting for these candidates is often seen by voters as a protest vote against the two establishment parties. But the net impact is that establishment Republicans are elected and re-elected.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy is a Fellow at the Brennan Center, a Professor of Law at Stetson University, and the author of the book Political Brands. You can reach her at ctorress@law.stetson.edu.