Somebody’s voice identifying the owner as something like “Maria Nicholas” (I think that’s what it sounded like) just robocalled me and urged me to vote for Gonzalo Sanabria in the Coral Gables County Commission race because he is the only registered Republican in the Group 4 race. It called him a “good Republican” and said he do the sort of things they do — slash budgets and the like. (It was a short call and went by too fast for me to try to take any near-verbatim notes.)
Needless to say, the association of Sanabria with the Governor of Florida did not make me more likely to vote for Sanabria, rather the reverse. And it’s worse than that: I had no idea Sanabria was the only Republican in the nonpartisan race. After all, several of the other candidates, including Quesada, are sounding pretty Republican to me.
The call did not say it was paid for by the Sanabria campaign, in fact it did not identify who paid for it at all. I don’t have caller ID on my land line so I can’t identify the source that way either. (If anyone who does gets this call, please let us know.) Unless this is a false flag operation, someone is not spending their money at all wisely: if they can figure out that I live in the Gables from the voter records, it shouldn’t be that hard to look up the fact that I’m registered as a Democrat and correlate that with my phone number.
Does anyone know who “Maria Nicholas” or the like might be? Is she a local GOP bigwig? Also, do independent political expenditures (if that’s what paid for this) in a municipal election have any legal obligation to ID the source when doing robocalls? I know they would have that obligation in a federal election, but I don’t know the relevant state/local law.
