Spanish misinformation: Election Day poll monitoring, and following the Hialeah attack
The latest on misinformation and disinformation on Spanish-language radio and social media this campaign season.
Good afternoon, everyone! I hope your Friday’s going well.
I hope you all got the chance to vote and let your voice be heard. It could be a couple of days until we know about which party will win the U.S. House of Representatives and about a month until we know about the Senate. Most of the early votes and Election Day votes have been counted; we’re mostly waiting on mail-in ballots along with provisional ballots, the New York Times reported. A trend has emerged in the past couple of years of Democrats mailing in their ballots ahead of the election and Republicans turning in their ballots near the election or voting in person.
Miami-Dade County voted for Gov. Ron DeSantis. He is the first Republican candidate to win the county since 2002. In the past year, registered Republican voters in Florida surpassed Democrats for the first time ever, the Herald reported.
This is Lesley Cosme Torres again, here with the latest on Spanish-language disinformation in South Florida elections. This week I’m featuring narratives surrounding the U.S. Justice Department’s efforts to monitor polling places in South Florida, the attack on Christopher Monzon in Hialeah and whether it was politically motivated, a viral Telegram post on Election Day, and a pro-Republican caravan led by Alex Otaola.
In other media news, following Elon Musk’s takeover, Twitter has laid off 50% of its employees, Reuters reported after a tweet by the company’s head of safety and integrity, Yoel Roth. Roth announced that 15% of Twitter’s employees on the trust and safety team, the arm responsible for preventing the spread of misinformation and harmful content, were laid off.
As always, If you read or hear anything you find misleading on Spanish-language radio or on social media via WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, or Twitter, email me.
Enjoy your weekend!
Lesley
The Department of Justice to monitor polling sites in South Florida and 24 states across the country
Across popular Miami-based Telegram channels, there were increasing concerns on Election Day about the Department of Justice sending monitors to polling places and ballot boxes in 24 states, including in South Florida. The narrative followed that this practice was new and that by “roaming” polling places, these monitors would be used to intimidate Florida voters. The DeSantis administration pushed back against efforts to monitor polling stations, writing in a letter to the DOJ that the “Department of Justice monitors are not permitted under Florida law.”
“This is not to be confrontational in any way,” Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd said to CNN. “They sent a letter to the counties asking for permission to be in the polling places. We told them that under state law, that is not permitted, and we asked them to respect state law, and that they can go there and do their job, but they have to do that job outside of the polling place.”
Brendon Leslie, the editor-in-chief of Florida’s Voice, a conservative digital news network based in Southwest Florida available in both English and Spanish, tweeted about how election monitors from the DOJ would be banned in Florida and how monitors would be counterproductive and undermine confidence in the election. But the practice of having federal monitors in polling places can be traced back to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, CNN reported. Federal monitors include people from the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and its U.S. Attorneys’ Offices. Yet how the DOJ did this monitoring was “impeded by the 2013 Supreme Court ruling that gutted parts of the law.”
Christopher Monzon’s Hialeah drama shows the enduring impact of Miami Spanish radio.
Christopher Monzon, a Republican canvasser, was attacked on a street in Hialeah. Accusations that the attack was politically motivated quickly followed: First, from a radio interview on Radio Mambí, and then by a tweet from U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio echoing the same message, that Republicans weren’t allowed in Hialeah — even though Hialeah is already a highly Republican area that went for Trump in 2016 and then again in 2020.
“It’s a great story if you’re the Rubio campaign,” said Matthew Baum, a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and co-founder of the Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review. “It fits with the narrative coming from lots of Republicans that it’s the left that’s responsible for violence, not us.”
On Wednesday, Gabriel Garcia, a former Proud Boy facing trial for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection who helped organize a rally for Monzon, walked back his support. After watching new videos of the moments before the men attacked Monzon, Garcia thinks the canvasser is lying about being a victim of a politically motivated attack, the Herald reported.
“After seeing the new evidence and video, this was not politically motivated and Chris took advantage of the situation,” said Garcia, who serves on the Miami-Dade County Republican Party’s Executive Committee. “I hope he goes to jail for lying to the detective on his BS story and same with little Marco for taking advantage of this situation for political gains.”
Viral Telegram post “News camera catches man dropping multiple ballots into drop box”
A video of a woman dropping off several ballots went viral with more than 66,000 views in a post that was published in the Telegram channel Chris Nelson Uncensored, who frequently talks about DeSantis and South Florida politics. I found the same video and caption in several other channels. The video came from The Floridian, a media platform that covers Florida politics published by Javier Manjarres. The Telegram caption read: “WATCH!! News Camera CATCHES man dropping MULTIPLE BALLOTS into Drop Box behind Broward Supervisor of Elections While Elections Employee DOES NOTHING!!”
The post seems to disregard two factors from the original story in The Floridian:
1. The gender of the person voting and the fact that she inserted three ballots.
2. Per Florida Statute 101.65, 104.0615, someone other than the voter is allowed to return up to two ballots per election cycle in addition to their own ballot. That person would need to be an immediate family member, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
From YouTube to Miami streets: Influencer leads pro-Republican, anti-communism caravan
Last Saturday I followed a caravan that drove around Miami-Dade County on the eve of the midterm elections led by Spanish-language social media influencer Alex Otaola. The caravan was rallying for Republicans and on behalf of GOP candidates, encouraging participants to vote and “save America from communism and socialism.”
Otaola, who has a YouTube channel with 253,000 subscribers, Cubanos por el Mundo, live-streamed the event. He ended up bringing the parade of cars to an early-voting center in Coconut Grove. He stood through his sunroof while driving, shouting “Vota Republicano! Save America!” while an army of cars followed behind him with American flags and Trump 2024 banners blaring their horns..
“Say no to negotiations with dictatorships. Say no to open-border policies implemented by the Biden administration and all the insecurities that are all over the American nation,” Otaola said during a brief interview outside the early voting center at the former museum of science in Coconut Grove, where he stopped to take photos with fans at the caravan’s endpoint. “This caravan is to tell the Democrats that we’re here to recover and save America.”
Otaola is one of the most influential Spanish-language personalities in Miami. He’s known for exaggerating the influence of socialism and communism in the Democratic party and spreading hateful rhetoric in his videos that are several hours long. Critics accuse him of being a large influence in promoting Spanish-language misinformation.
This newsletter is part of a project on misinformation in Spanish-language media by the Miami Herald, el Nuevo Herald and researchers at Florida International University. It is funded by Journalism Funding Partners, which received support from the Knight Disinformation Fund at The Miami Foundation. The Miami Herald retains editorial control of the content.