Court Ruling Gives Miami a Brand New Old Mayor

After a week in which this city had no mayor, there now appears to be a new one.

It’s the old mayor.

In yet another twist in politics Miami-style, Joe Carollo was in and Xavier Suarez was out Wednesday after a state appeals court voided all 5,000 absentee ballots cast in November.

That decision by the 3rd District Court of Appeal means Carollo scored an outright victory in the Nov. 4 election, making moot the runoff he lost 10 days later. Carollo is now cleared to serve out the rest of the four-year term, which Suarez began serving in late November. Confused? So are voters in this city of 365,000 residents, who have been rocked by waves of scandal, fiscal woes and uncertainty. Just last week, Judge Thomas S. Wilson Jr.--after a trial in which he found widespread vote fraud--ordered a new mayoral election to be held within 60 days. The appeals court decision apparently supersedes that order.

“This is a great city that didn’t deserve what it got in the last few months,” said Carollo, the 42-year-old former (and now current) mayor. “I am not going to be doing the sort of things you saw going on for the last four months.”

While Carollo did not elaborate on what goings-on he meant, Miami has been in the news around the world recently as a result of alleged criminal misdeeds on the part of city commissioners, the well-documented vote fraud fiasco, a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall and the unusual behavior of the 48-year-old Suarez.

In a profile of the city broadcast on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Suarez was asked about his erratic conduct since winning office in an election tainted by what Wilson ruled was “a massive, well-conceived and well-orchestrated voter fraud scheme.” Suarez, who served two terms as mayor from 1985 to 1993, has denied any connection to the fraud and explained his frenetic behavior as an expression of his eagerness for the job.

Suarez did not answer calls for comment Wednesday. But one of his attorneys, Marcos Gonzalez-Balboa, said the decision by the three-judge panel “poses more problems than it solves. The judges have taken away honest absentee voters’ right to vote.”

On Wednesday, the judges said that they made a distinction between those voters who went to polls and those who voted absentee, refusing to invalidate the votes of the former by tossing out the whole election. Unlike the right to vote, which is assured every citizen by the Constitution, the ability to vote by absentee ballot is a “privilege,” the panel said.

In the same CBS broadcast, political scientist Dario Moreno of Florida International University commented that Miami is “almost the definition of a Third World banana republic” and that Cubans had “perfected” political corruption to a “fine art.” That comment touched off an angry reaction from many Cuban Americans, some of whom demanded that Moreno be fired.

That characterization also served to gild Miami’s image as a manic city on the edge of chaos.

“This is an extraordinary act of judicial intervention,” Moreno said. “To remove a city mayor and replace him with his opponent is almost unheard of in American politics. It is a drastic action which speaks to the level of vote fraud.”

“Clearly, the city of Miami has suffered greatly,” said Joe Geller, an attorney for Carollo. “Clearly, the city of Miami needs to have a firm hand, a steady hand, and move forward.”

Carollo said he would provide that steady hand. “So many people throughout the world have been snickering,” he said during a press conference on the City Hall lawn. “The message we send to America and the world today is that this is what democracy is about.”