Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office investigates voter fraud allegations in Surfside

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle’s Office is looking into multiple complaints of voter fraud in Surfside, three high-ranking members of the agency confirmed this week.

But contrary to what former Surfside Mayor Shlomo Danziger claimed, the investigation doesn’t include him.

Danzinger, who placed fourth in a six-way race for Miami-Dade Mayor last month, emailed members of the press five days before the Aug. 20 Primary accusing Fernandez Rundle of “secretly investigating” him and “over 100 newly registered Jewish voters.”

The probe, he said, began in response to complaints from the man who unseated him in Surfside six months ago, Mayor Charles Burkett.

Danzinger also posited that Fernandez Rundle was retaliating against him for trying to get Gov. Ron DeSantis to remove her from office last year.

Deputy Chief Assistant State Attorney Tim VanderGiesen, who heads the State Attorney’s Office’s Public Corruption Unit, told Florida Politics his agency had received “many complaints” about non-Surfside residents voting in the town’s March election.

“We’re still running some of them down,” he said by phone Wednesday. “An overwhelming amount of them we’ve determined to be unfounded. They have a connection to Surfside we believe enabled them to legally vote.”

VanderGiesen added that the investigation “never had anything to do with (Danzinger).” While the number of people accused of fraudulently casting ballots was “a substantial sum,” he said, it was not close to 100.

As for Danzinger’s contention that Jewish residents were being targeted in the investigation, Chief Assistant State Attorney Howard Rosen said there’s no truth to it.

“As a Jewish person who’s worked in this office for 40 years, we make no inquiry ever because of — nor do we even really know — the religion of subjects of investigations,” he said. “I mean, I know Shlomo Danzinger is Jewish, but these voters? No idea.”

Jose Arrojo, the immediate past Executive Director of Miami-Dade’s ethics panel who joined Fernandez Rundle’s leadership team in May, estimated the investigation would be done in a month or two.

Danzinger said Friday that while the State Attorney’s Office may not be deliberately going after Jewish voters, the complaints were nonetheless against member of Surfside’s Jewish community. It’s also peculiar, he said, that Fernandez Rundle would commit resources to scrutinizing voter fraud accusations since she’s declined to do the same for complaints he raised.

“I spoke to an attorney recently who deals with government law and things like this, and his assumption was that this was some kind of retribution because the State Attorney’s Office here doesn’t usually address voter fraud,” he said. “That’s usually something that would have gone up to the Attorney General in Tallahassee. The fact there’s a special investigator going around Surfside looking into election fraud is not within the norm.”

Arrojo, Rosen and VanderGiesen confirmed there is a special investigator from the State Attorney’s Office who has been speaking with residents and possible nonresidents of Surfside about the voter fraud complaints.

Florida Politics contacted Burkett for comment Friday afternoon but received no response by press time. In a Feb. 23 social media post showing an image declaring “Voter fraud is a felony,” Burkett said Danzinger was using local synagogues as registration sites and that “many of the new voters he’s signing up, live in empty lots, empty houses and in other cities.”

The post, to which Danzinger responded with an admonishment against voter intimidation, included a link to a page on Burkett’s campaign website where Burkett also accused then-Commissioner Jeff Rose of voter fraud.

Pointing fingers

Danzinger sent a 24-page document to reporters on Aug. 15 accusing Fernandez Rundle of persecuting him and his supporters because he’d complained to DeSantis about her “reluctance to prosecute criminals and law enforcement’s expressed frustration with her office.”

The document included a letter Danzinger sent the Governor on Aug. 18, 2023, while he was still Surfside Mayor, decrying Fernandez Rundle’s “concerning pattern” of non-prosecution.

Danzinger had been placed under 24-hour police protection less than two weeks before he contacted DeSantis after a self-identified Nazi threatened to murder him and his family.

Case summaries Danzinger included in his letter to DeSantis showed that in numerous instances since 2021 — including the threat against Danzinger last year — the offices of Fernandez Rundle and U.S. Attorney Markenzy Lapointe either reduced charges against criminals who targeted Surfside, its residents or businesses, or declined to pursue a case against them.

The document also included emails Danzinger sent to ex-U.S. Ambassador David Milstein, a former DeSantis campaign adviser, and Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Mark Glass about Fernandez Rundle’s “reluctance to prosecute cases.”

Other emails in the document from Golden Beach Police Chief Rudy Herbello and North Bay Village Deputy Chief Samuel Bejar included discussions of how local law enforcement must “put more convincing pressure” on Fernandez Rundle and her staff to seek stronger sentencing to tamp down on a “pandemic” of crime in the area.

Fernandez Rundle coasted into a seventh term without opposition in April. The month before, Danzinger lost his first re-election bid by 98 votes in a rematch with Burkett, whom he supplanted two years before by an even narrower margin.

Danzinger said he’d previously complained about election tampering that went uninvestigated. In one such case, he said a poll worker who didn’t like him told Jewish residents they couldn’t vote. In another a “former and current elected official” voted in the town’s election despite living primarily in Cocoa Beach.

He clarified Friday that he was referring to Commissioner Nelly Velasquez, whom he frequently clashed with at Town Hall. Florida Politics contacted Velasquez for comment and will update this report upon receipt of a response.

In November, Velasquez filed an ethics complaint against Danzinger accusing him of improperly campaigning from the dais.

The Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics and Public Trust agreed with her, ruling in May that there was probable cause he violated county ethics strictures by presenting a slideshow featuring images from his 2022 campaign website during an August 2023 government meeting.

Danzinger called the memo “rife with inaccurate and false information” in a statement provided to the Miami Herald. He’s since challenged the decision.

He noted Friday that he didn’t launch his re-election campaign until January and therefore couldn’t have been campaigning when he showed a screenshot of his old website.

Some suggest Danzinger’s activity in recent months has been less about pursuing justice than generating headlines.

He sued Miami-Dade and several of its officers last month on the eve of Election Day to remove Mayor Daniella Levine Cava from the ballot. In the complaint, he accused county election officials of conspiring with Levine Cava’s campaign to have her last name be counted on the ballot as “Cava,” not “Levine Cava,” so that she appeared above her list of challengers.

“This lawsuit is not about personal politics; it’s about ensuring fairness and integrity in our elections,” he said at the time.

A Judge tossed the suit the following morning.