Hialeah's AB machine whirs again

The numbers are simply staggering.

Ladra took a stroll down the Miami-Dade election department's website and the absentee ballot report as of Tuesday's totals show that a whopping 17,780 absentee ballots have been mailed in Hialeah. That's 20 percent of the 88,565 or so voters registered.

There are more than twice as many ABs already mailed out to Hialeah voters than to voters in Miami, where 7,680 absentee ballots were sent out among the 74,430 registered voters in the two contested seats, for 10 percent so far. Miami Beach has a barely respectable 3,862 ABs mailed out among it's roughly 43,000 registered voters (just under nine percent). Homestead gets no respect: 980 ABs have been mailed out so far to less than 5 percent of the 20,000 registered voters.

But that's not the end of the story because there could be thousands more ABs requested and mailed in the City of Retrogress,  which is famous for its history with AB voter fraud. Because while the number of absentee ballot requests taper off in the other three cities, it practically explodes exponentially in Hialeah. After the initial 16,093 were sent Oct. 8 to voters who are already on the county's AB list, the elections department has been sending boxes of  ballots to Hialeahns who have also requested them for this election -- 80 went out between Oct. 11 and 12, another 115 were sent on Oct. 13 and more than double, 262, went out on Oct. 14. After the weekend, another 425 ballots were mailed to Hialeah voters on Monday and 805 went out on Tuesday.

In comparison, 15 ABs were mailed to voters in Miami and seven to voters in Miami Beach Tuesday. The same day, 805 were mailed to voters in Hialeah.

How much you want to bet more than 2,000 additional absentee ballots are mailed out by the end of this week?

But Hialeah also has a higher rate of return, caballero. You get out of it what you put into it, right? No wonder it is the AB capital of the world. As of the close of day on Tuesday, there were 5,354 absentee ballots returned from Hialeah voters. Again, proportionally larger and more than twice as many as the 2,107 returned so far in the city of Miami elections, the 1,005 returned in Miami Beach and the 342 that came back to the elections department from Homestead.

These staggering, mushrooming numbers can only mean that the AB requests have been intentionally seeded in Hialeah -- and that the absentee ballot brokers are now in the harvest. Several voters have already reported having campaign workers or employees from the alcaldito's office at City Hall come by to collect their ballots. Two of the council candidates have told Ladra they were approached by a known broker (more on that later) and the Miami-Dade Police Department's public corruption unit is, yet again, investigating allegations of a well-oiled, fine-tuned absentee ballot machine run by AB Queen Sasha Tirador, who has sub-soldiers that work the assisted living facilities and public housing buildings for hundreds of questionable votes.

Let's hope something sticks this time -- before the next election finds more than 50 percent of voters casting their ballots by mail (read: risk having their votes stolen).