Politics in Medley: Relatives elected, two-vote margin, winner’s attorney claims fraud
In the tiny town of Medley, the margin of victory was just two votes in a recent election that put a wife and husband together on a town council for the first known time in Florida.
Then weeks after the Jan. 25 election results were certified, the lawyer who represented the winning candidate complained in a memo to local authorities that he had discovered a “disturbing pattern” of voters who appeared not to live in the industrial town.
Former town attorney Michael Pizzi said he chose to flag what he found because of election integrity, despite the win of Karina Pacheco, whom he represented during a recount.
He said he discovered the potential problems while reviewing absentee ballots for Pacheco but lodged the complaint independently, when he was no longer representing her.
“There are clearly people voting in the city who are not legally allowed to vote in the city,” Pizzi said in an interview. “In Medley, that means the elections can be decided by fraud.”
The Miami Herald found that it appears several voters identified by Pizzi — enough to potentially affect the outcome of an election with a final tally of 199 to 197 — had their main residences outside Medley.
In this industrial West Miami-Dade town with a population of 1,100, most people live in mobile home parks and businesses outnumber residents, the mayor is one of the highest paid elected officials in the county and council members make about $54,000 per year.
The mayor’s political rival was arrested late last year for allegedly selling food that was donated to a former football star’s charity, charges she has denied. And it’s commonplace for relatives to serve in elected office together and be employed by the town.
After the January election, Pizzi said that some voters who cast ballots may not live in Medley — including, he claimed, a town employee involved in overseeing the election.
Pizzi flagged the suspected irregularities to Miami-Dade’s State Attorney’s Office, Commission on Ethics and Elections Department. The State Attorney’s Office is looking into his claims, a source confirmed to the Herald.
Pizzi resigned as Medley town attorney in 2013 as he faced federal charges related to his role as mayor of Miami Lakes. A jury later cleared him of all charges.
One of the voters Pizzi named in his memo was Assistant Town Clerk Jenny Digiacomo-Lozano, who votes from the same Medley address as her mother, Griselia Digiacomo, a town councilwoman for over a decade until 2020.
But Digiacomo-Lozano spends at least some of her time 13 miles north in Pembroke Pines, where she and her husband own a home. Her husband is registered to vote there and claims a homestead exemption on the property, a mechanism that provides tax breaks at a person’s lone permanent residence.
On a recent weekday, Jenny Digiacomo-Lozano, 31, was seen stepping outside the Pembroke Pines home shortly after 6 a.m. before heading to Medley Town Hall. After work, she stopped briefly at her mother’s house across the street and then returned to the Pembroke Pines address in the early evening.
Digiacomo-Lozano did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The Herald found that Digiacomo-Lozano’s supervisor, Town Clerk Victoria Martinez, was also registered to vote in Medley but linked to a residence elsewhere.
Martinez voted in January and is registered at her mother’s home on Northwest South River Drive, just down the road from Griselia Digiacomo’s address in a community of small mobile homes that line narrow streets. A man identified in a 2014 town publication as Martinez’s longtime partner, Omar Sanchez, voted from the same address.
But Martinez and Sanchez also jointly own a home in Miami Gardens, property records show, and Sanchez claims a homestead exemption there.
Martinez, 41, told the Herald she has always lived in Medley and never at the home in Miami Gardens, but she wouldn’t say whether she and Sanchez currently live together, nor why he would claim the Miami Gardens home as his permanent residence while being registered to vote at a Medley address.
“I can only speak for myself in this matter,” Martinez said. “Everybody knows where I live because it’s a small town.”
No one answered the door recently at the Miami Gardens location, but a neighbor said renters have lived in the home since Sanchez and his partner, whose name she could not recall, moved out a few years earlier. Meanwhile at their address in Medley, a car that Martinez had been seen driving days earlier was parked in the driveway.
Martinez did not respond to subsequent requests for comment on whether she and Sanchez were renting out the Miami Gardens property. Sanchez could not be reached.
As the town clerk, Martinez serves as the local supervisor of elections and is responsible for vetting candidates for office, ensuring they meet requirements that include being a town resident. She also sits on a canvassing board that reviews rejected ballots.
Martinez said she has lived in Medley since 1996 and raised her children there.
“We have a long history in this town,” she said.
‘Gossip is the daily bread’
While Martinez denied any issues with her own voting status, she acknowledged a history of “rumors” about Medley voters and elected officials living beyond town borders.
“The rumors have always existed,” she said. “Gossip is the daily bread that fuels everybody here.”
The Herald found that at least a few of the voters flagged by Pizzi may live outside Medley.
One homeowner, Ana Maria Guzman, said two members of her extended family first registered to vote at her Medley address when they immigrated to the United States and became citizens, then continued voting in the town’s elections despite moving to other parts of the county. Guzman, a Realtor, said she believed this was a common practice. The two family members did not return requests for comment.
In another instance, a man who identified himself as Tony denied that two people registered to vote at his address on Northwest South River Drive actually live there, saying he has lived there for 24 years and doesn’t know who the people are. The two voters also could not be reached for comment.
One voter identified by Pizzi was registered at the address of a local business, J&N Keystone, didn’t answer the door there on a recent weeknight. Reached by phone, he said he uses the Medley address but resides “in a few places,” including Massachusetts. He declined to elaborate.
Florida law allows voters who don’t have permanent traditional housing to register at an address where they regularly stay or receive messages.
Other voters Pizzi named in his memo do seem to live in Medley. One of them, 78-year-old Miriam Rueda, came to her door on a recent night and told a reporter she has lived there with family members including her grandchildren for years.
Rueda said she always votes in town elections and supported Pacheco in January.
Florida’s residency laws are notoriously loose. Voters are supposed to register at their permanent residence if they have one, which determines the only municipality in which they can vote. But courts have ruled that voters can register wherever they “mentally intend” to reside, allowing them to use records like a driver’s license or a utility bill to prove intent.
On the one hand, experts said, voters failing to change their registrations after they move isn’t unusual. As long as a person isn’t voting from more than one address in Florida, it’s rare for authorities to challenge their residency, said election lawyer and former state representative Juan-Carlos Planas.
“I’m sure there are a lot of men in this town that are still registered to vote where their ex-wives and kids live, even though they haven’t lived there in years,” Planas said. “The issue is, if you let those people slide, you’re letting the others slide.”
Planas said non-residents shouldn’t be voting in municipalities where they don’t pay taxes or receive services. And given the narrow margin of the recent Medley election and the authority of the town clerk’s office, he said the claims should be taken seriously.
“It becomes more egregious in Medley because there are so few residents that a couple of false registrations could make the difference,” he said.
Small town, high turnout
Nearly 400 of Medley’s approximately 700 registered voters cast ballots in January, a turnout of 56% — an unusually high number for a special municipal election.
Pacheco defeated Lourdes Rodriguez to join her husband Ivan on the town council. While it is legal for spouses to serve together, experts say it will be nearly impossible to know if they are discussing town business privately in violation of Florida’s Sunshine Law.
The Pachecos are the first spouses known to have served together on a municipal council in Florida’s history. But local government in Medley has long been a family affair. A father and daughter, Edgar and Lizelh Ayala, are two of the other elected officials on the council. The fifth is Mayor Roberto Martell, the town’s top administrator who makes over $200,000 per year — more than the mayor of Hialeah, which has a population about 200 times that of Medley.
The recent accusations of potential voter misconduct come months after the November arrest of former Councilwoman Lily Stefano, who was charged with using a charity started by former NFL star Santana Moss to sell donated food without his knowledge. Her arrest and suspension from office led to January’s special election. The criminal case is still pending.
Earlier last year, ethics investigators found Stefano gave away donated items to residents that were worth as much as $1,000 apiece as part of a “ruse” to promote her mayoral campaign. She delivered recliners, bicycles and coffee makers from the back of a golf cart adorned with her campaign slogan.
Those types of giveaways can have an impact in Medley, where the median household income is around $30,000 and the town organizes regular food distributions.
Martinez, the town clerk, said people who live in the town tend to feel permanently connected.
“This is such a small town that you get to know people on a very personal level,” she said. “It’s hard to detach.”
Miami Herald staff photographer Pedro Portal contributed reporting.
