No-party candidate in Miami election fraud case takes plea deal, apologizes to voters
An auto parts salesman and acquaintance of a former Miami lawmaker accused of running a vote-siphoning scheme in a 2020 Florida Senate race pleaded guilty Tuesday to two campaign finance charges and agreed to help prosecutors try the man who recruited him to run for office.
Alexis Rodriguez, who was paid more than $40,000 by former Republican state Sen. Frank Artiles to run as a no-party candidate in the key Senate District 37 race, pleaded guilty to two felony charges: conspiracy to accept or make campaign contributions in excess of legal limits and accepting and making those excess campaign contributions.
Investigators say Rodriguez ran to “confuse voters and siphon votes from the incumbent,” a Democrat who shares the same surname and ultimately lost his seat by just 32 votes. Artiles, who has also been charged, has pleaded not guilty.
In exchange for his guilty plea, Rodriguez, who is represented by attorney William Barzee, will serve three years probation, including one year on house arrest with a GPS monitor. He can’t work for any political campaigns during that time, and he has to cooperate with prosecutors.
He was previously facing four felony charges and up to 20 years in prison.
Seated alongside his attorney in his downtown law office, Rodriguez, 55, heard the terms of his plea from circuit court Judge Andrea Ricker Wolfson, who is overseeing the case.
“I am deeply sorry for my actions and I want to apologize to my family, my loved ones and my friends,” Rodriguez said through tears, speaking publicly for the first time since his arrest. “I would like to publicly offer a sincere apology to the residents of Florida District Senate 37 including [incumbent] Sen. José Javier Rodríguez, the people of Miami-Dade County and the state of Florida, and anyone else who was affected by my actions.”
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, whose public corruption unit led the investigation, called Rodriguez’s plea “an important step in the effort to restore honesty to Florida’s election process, which has been tarnished too long by almost invisible, independent and write-in candidates.”
“Mr. Rodriguez’ critical testimony will shed light on the dirty election tricks used to steal our democracy and is the price he is paying for helping rob our community of its right to honest representation,” she wrote in a statement.
Artiles still fighting
Rodriguez’s plea deal formalizes his relationship with prosecutors, an arrangement Artiles’ attorneys have highlighted for weeks as the court treated the two men as co-defendants. Rodriguez’s account of what happened in the case was used heavily in Artiles’ arrest affidavit.
“He has been acting at all times in this case as an agent for the State and now the public knows that it is official,” attorney Frank Quintero wrote in an email. “We will be looking forward to deposing Mr. Rodriguez and exposing him for who he really is.”
Investigators say Artiles funneled more than $40,000 to Rodriguez in exchange for him changing his party affiliation from Republican and qualifying for the ballot as a no-party candidate in Senate District 37. Investigators are still looking into the origin of the money, but court records say Artiles would repeatedly grab stacks of cash — ranging from $3,000 to $5,000 — from his home safe and give them to Rodriguez in the months leading up to the election.
They also say Rodriguez submitted false information on his sworn candidate documents, marking that he lived in a Palmetto Bay home inside the district he was running to represent, when he was actually renting a house in Boca Raton at the time of the election. Knowingly filing an incorrect address with the state — or assisting someone to do so — is a third-degree felony.
Rodriguez didn’t campaign, but received more than 6,000 votes out of 215,000 ballots cast. Ultimately, GOP Sen. Ileana Garcia won the election by 32 votes, taking a seat thought to be in a relatively safe Democratic district and further strengthening Republicans’ hold in Tallahassee in a year Democrats said they could win control in the Senate.
Artiles, who has pleaded not guilty on similar charges related to the alleged scheme, still faces trial.
Last week a Miami circuit court judge set a check-in hearing date for Oct. 19, after Artiles’ lawyers asked for more time. The trial was originally set to begin Aug 30.
Rodriguez’s plea deal hasn’t let him off the hook with the Florida Ethics Commission, which has called for a full evidentiary hearing that could result in fines of up to $20,000.
Herald/Times Tallahassee bureau reporter Ana Ceballos contributed to this report.
This story was originally published August 24, 2021 at 10:39 AM.