There is a long article in today’s Gainesville Sun about the illegal activities of Frank Artiles, a former Republican State Representative who had to resign after some of his racist rants were recorded.
He will stand trial for electoral fraud on Aug 30.
Briefly, he paid sham candidates to get on ballots three times in 2020, just to siphon away enough votes from the Democratic candidates to tilt the races. He first tried in 2018, in my hometown of Gainesville, and he was successful. I will not repeat the article; it is long, read it if you can. Let me mention one thing that is just mentioned in the article. In 2018, before the general election, there was also a Democratic primary in my FL Senate district. There were two candidates, both were white woman. Once was an older doctor, who seemed to have a good chance to win the general. The other one was a much younger person whom nobody knew, but who had a lot of money. She said she was the real, radical deal… Every day, I got something in my mailbox from her. She said all the progressive things, free college, free healthcare, etc, but something was off. Perhaps it was that she was too mechanical in listing her demands. There was a list of demands, and nothing more. At all.
A week later, it turned out she was paid by republican dark money. The more reasonable candidate won the primary, but not before spending a lot of her money…
Let us not celebrate early, but I am so far happy to see that even in FL, you can get busted for this.
This is a Creative Commons article. The original version of this article appeared here.
This just means, even if the odds aren’t good, as long as you don’t give up there’s till a chance for justice to prevail. We’re not guaranteed victory we have to fight for it tooth and nail.