Last year, less than a month before Election Day, voters in Seminole and Volusia counties who would help decide one of the closest state Senate elections in Florida began receiving mailers touting a little-known independent candidate: Jestine Iannotti.
The mailers featured a stock photo of a Black woman, promised a candidate free from the influence of special interests who would “change the politics in Tallahassee,” and emphasized her focus on social justice, climate change and campaign finance reform.
It was pure fiction.
Iannotti is a white woman who was already planning to move to Sweden. The mailers were designed by Republican strategists in Tallahassee. And the dark money that financed the ad campaign was controlled by consultants working closely with utility giant Florida Power & Light — whose corporate lobbyists were privately rooting for the Republican candidate and eventual winner of the race, Sen. Jason Brodeur of Sanford.
Iannotti was one of three so-called “ghost candidates” used by Republican consultants last year to help tip the scales in three key Senate races, helping the Republican Party retain control of the 40-member Florida Senate. The scandal has set off a sprawling and still-ongoing criminal probe that has led to the arrests of two people.
But this was not an isolated incident.
A months-long investigation by the Orlando Sentinel has found that some of the architects of Florida’s ghost candidate scheme have guided behind-the-scenes campaigns to tilt elections and influence public policy all across the state.
Their work often involves many of the same deceptive methods used in last year’s Senate races — passing money through daisy chains of dark-money groups, paying friends and family members to help cover their tracks, setting up sham grassroots groups and even intimidating opponents.
The strategies have been revealed through a criminal investigation by prosecutors in Miami-Dade County — and by a bitter falling-out between political operatives who had been working for some of Florida’s largest companies, including FPL, sugar-grower Florida Crystals and phosphate-miner Mosaic Co.
Many details of the tactics — and the financial connections that link those using them — were exposed in late November, when the Orlando Sentinel was anonymously delivered a cache of checks, bank statements, emails, text messages, invoices, ledgers and more, covering the work of political consultants to FPL over a roughly four-year period between 2016 and 2020. FPL has denied its employees had any role in the ghost candidate scheme.
What has emerged from this flood of disclosures is something akin to a playbook: a collection of tactics and strategies deployed from the Panhandle to Miami to sway elections for everything from mayor to state senator, resist efforts to reshape Florida’s Constitution — and advance the interests of some powerful corporations.
Read the rest of the story here.
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