José Javier Rodríguez lost to the Republican in the race by 32.Īlexis Pedro Rodriguez was one of three alleged “ghost candidates” in the 2020 cycle whose campaigns were apparently designed to siphon votes from Democrats running for the Florida Senate. Despite not actively campaigning in the 2020 contest, Alexis Pedro Rodriguez received 6,300 votes. The next year, Matrix directed the transfer of $550,000 that in part paid for mailers backing the unknown challenger, Alexis Pedro Rodriguez, an auto parts dealer with no party affiliation. The executives immediately forwarded the message to Matrix’s CEO, according to the documents leaked to the Times/Herald and other news organizations. In one case, records show that Matrix worked to support a candidate with the same last name as a Democratic incumbent, José Javier Rodríguez, in an apparent effort to sow confusion, redirect votes and help a Republican win his Miami state Senate seat.Īfter reading a news story about a bill sponsored by Rodríguez that threatened FPL’s hold on the state solar energy market, Eric Silagy, president and CEO of FPL, gave his top executives a clear order: “I want you to make his life a living riously,’’ he wrote in a Jan. Related: FPL funds secretly paid for a spoiler candidate in a 2018 Florida race Previous leaks to the Orlando Sentinel and the Florida Times-Union documented how Matrix, while in the employ of FPL, blew past ethical boundaries, including having a Times-Union journalist tailed by a private investigator and pumping resources into the campaigns of “spoiler candidates” geared to siphon votes from FPL’s political opponents. They reveal an operation carefully choreographed with a consistent goal: Take down elected officials who stood in the way of FPL’s interests - without disclosing the company as the source of the funds while leaving enough distance to allow FPL, its high-level managers and its chief executive to deny involvement.Įmails show Matrix officials setting up friends and family as operators of nonprofit groups and then directing the nonprofits’ use as pipelines for campaign contributions. The documents come from inside Matrix, an Alabama-based political consulting firm that worked for FPL until last year. Unlike the voters who said they didn’t understand the law, FPL’s executives and political consultants were clearly aware of the need to cloak their activities, according to a trove of documents leaked to the Times/Herald and other news organizations. Dunn noted that county election offices had processed and accepted voter registration forms for Grant and the others without flagging them as ineligible, and that the state signed off.
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