“They stole an election”: Former Florida senator found guilty in “ghost candidates” scandal

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

Former Florida state Sen. Frank Artiles was convicted by a Miami-Dade Circuit Court jury Monday evening, the latest fallout from the state’s 2020 “ghost candidates” scandal.

Artiles was convicted on three felony counts related to $44,000 in payments he made to Alex Rodriguez, a no-party candidate whose role was to siphon votes from Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez, the Democratic incumbent. The six-member jury deliberated for seven hours before reaching its verdict. Artiles was acquitted on a fourth count of aiding and abetting a false voter registration. Artiles sat stone-faced as the guilty verdicts were read.

“They won. They were successful. They beat JJR,” public corruption prosecutor Tim VanderGiesen said in his opening argument. “They beat the incumbent named Rodriguez.” 

“They stole an election,” he said. 

Artiles’ defense attorney Frank Quintero had reminded jurors that ghost candidates are legal “so long as Florida election law is not violated.”

But that’s precisely what the jury found. 

The term “ghost candidate” is used to describe a candidate who has no chance of winning, but runs to harm an actual contender’s chances. Ghost candidate Rodriguez was part of an opaquely funded 501(c)(4)—or “dark money”—effort enabled by consultants working for Florida Power & Light, a subsidiary of the NextEra utility conglomerate.

Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy, who was never charged with wrongdoing, had ordered his underlings to “make [Sen. Rodriguez’s] life a living hell.” Silagy retired abruptly in January 2023 in the wake of reporting by Floodlight and its media partners about FPL’s involvement in the ghost candidate scandal.

Artiles was charged with conspiracy, making campaign contributions above the $1,000 limit, and “false swearing” for instructing Alex Rodriguez—who actually lived outside District 37—on how to fill out paperwork to get on the ballot. 

Artiles, who faced up to five years in prison per count, sat quietly throughout the two-week trial. He was flanked by his attorneys, Quintero and Frank Quiñon. Behind him in the Miami courtroom was a revolving cast of friends and family.

The charges stem from efforts to achieve a Republican supermajority in the Florida Senate by running three ghost candidates to take votes away from Democratic candidates in key 2020 races. The spoiler candidates were backed, in part, by a series of nonprofits controlled by Jeff Pitts, then-CEO of Matrix LLC, a consulting company that was working for Florida Power & Light, according to reporting by Floodlight and other news outlets

The nonprofits in question were 501(c)(4)s, which are not required to disclose their donors’ identities, and the prosecution stopped short of tracing the money back to its original source. On September 27, Florida federal judge Aileen Cannon dismissed a shareholder lawsuit accusing FPL’s parent company, NextEra Energy, of issuing misleading statements about its political activities.

From the utility’s perspective, as noted in our earlier, in-depth story on the scandal, expanding GOP dominance—by whatever means—would help fulfill the utility’s legislative priorities:

Those priorities included escaping liability for damages related to power outages in the wake of Hurricane Irma; ousting J.R. Kelly, the state’s long-serving (unsympathetic) consumer utility watchdog; and winning approval from the Senate-confirmed Public Service Commission for Florida’s largest-ever hike in electricity rates. 

The defeat of Sen. Rodriguez had the added benefit of kneecapping one of the state’s most prominent backers of rooftop solar, which reduces carbon emissions and lowers utility bills—and against which FPL had waged a decade-long counterinsurgency campaign.

He was defeated by 32 votes by Ileana Garcia, founder of Latinas for Trump.

Prosecutors said consultants implicated in the scandal had withheld records that had been subpoenaed. Key evidence in the form of hundreds of text messages between Artiles and Rodriguez also went missing, they said.

Much of the trial revolved around the credibility of the state’s star witness, ghost candidate Alex Rodriguez, who admitted under cross examination that he had a difficult relationship with the truth. To buttress his credibility, prosecutors laid out the broader effort to influence the 2020 election. 

Their first witness was a reticent Pat Bainter, a north Florida peanut farmer and powerful operative for the state Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. 

In a pretrial deposition, Bainter, whose company, Data Targeting, did work for GOP candidates, had acknowledged he paid Artiles $15,000 a month for six months for on-the-ground research in the District 37 race, including running a spoiler candidate. Bainter also acknowledged he sent a $100,000 no-strings-attached payment to a 501(c)(4) nonprofit controlled by Artiles. 

Testimony and evidence presented at trial revealed that Bainter held meetings with Artiles and Garcia campaign consultants who had a business relationship with Pitts, then-CEO of Matrix.

Garcia’s campaign manager testified that Bainter held the purse strings for that campaign. Bainter, too, testified that his company worked for Garcia’s campaign.

Rodriguez took the stand late on the fourth day of the trial. Prosecutor VanderGiesen showed him totals from the 2020 race, in which he got 6,000 votes.

“Did you come about getting those votes honestly?”

“No,” Rodriguez responded. 

Rodriguez, who had pleaded guilty to election-related charges and served six months of home detention and three years of probation, also testified that Artiles offered him $50,000 to run as a spoiler: $25,000 before the election and $25,000 after.

But he was afraid Artiles would never come through on his promise to pay, so he “fabricated” a series of business deals involving construction equipment, diesel engines and COVID masks to extract money from Artiles. He also asked Artiles to help cover his rent and his daughter’s private school tuition, Rodriguez testified. 

At one point, he admitted, he invented a story about a Range Rover he was going to buy at auction for Artiles, asking the former state senator for a $10,900 payment.

His reason for all the scams? “I was concerned I wasn’t going to get the $50,000.”

The defense grilled Rodriguez, working to establish reasonable doubt about the nature of his transactions with Artiles. They portrayed the former senator as the victim in a series of fraudulent business deals and requests for financial help from Rodriguez. “The evidence is going to show that Rodriguez is a con artist, a professional con artist, a pathological liar,” Quintero told the jurors.

On the stand, Rodriguez didn’t defend himself, replying to Quintero’s increasingly forceful questions in a quiet monotone. 

The key question posed by the defense was: Could the state prove—incontrovertibly—that the payments at the heart of the case were illegal campaign contributions? 

“There is no other explanation,” VanderGiesen posited, “for why the defendant is giving tens of thousands of dollars to Alex Rodriguez.”

When approached by a reporter from Floodlight, Rodriguez declined to speak on the record until the end of the trial. He took the reporter’s phone number and said he would call. As he walked down the escalator, he shot the reporter a wink. 

The reporter also spoke to Artiles shortly before the verdict was handed down. Artiles called the trial “a colossal waste of time.”

“The press won’t report what’s really happening,” he said. 

The reporter replied that he’d be happy to write the whole story—if he could ever find out precisely what it was.