Seijas Lawsuit Dismissed
MIAMI (CBS4) - Miami-Dade District Judge Amy Donner dismissed the lawsuit filed by Commissioner Natacha Seijas seeking to stop her recall election.
The dismissal order came because Seijas did not include Miami-Dade County Clerk Harvey Ruvin in the lawsuit. Because his office handled the election and was not named in the suit, the court said it could not enter an injunction to stop the recall.
Seijas has been fighting her recall since she was placed on the same recall election ballot as Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Alvarez. Both are targets of angry voters for their support for a property tax hike.
Commissioner Seijas wanted the court to find that Ruvin's office "improperly included petitions in his certification that should have been excluded."
The lawyer for Seijas, Kendall Coffey, argued in court that her team didn't want the petitions decertified, but rather to stop the county from holding a recall election.
Judge Donner found that since certification of the petitions is the event that triggers recall and regardless of the terminology used, "there is no basis for stopping the election in the absence of a decertification of the petition, or a finding that the certification was invalid."
The court said that while this case was dismissed because Clerk Ruvin was not a party to the lawsuit, it has not made a finding on the substantive arguments that the parties made in regards to the validity of the petitions at issue.
In a videotaped deposition early in the day Monday, Seijas did not even want to admit she's fighting the recall. A lawyer for Miami Voice, the group behind the recall effort asked Seijas why she did not just submit to the will of voters at the ballot box.
Seijas answered, "Sir, I am not going to answer that question because I don't have an answer for you."
Her lawyers, meanwhile, hope to prove that a huge number of the more than 4 thousand recall petitions signed by voters are sloppy, incomplete, poorly notarized and inadequately certified.
But proponents of the recall produced their own documents—including a warranty deed for Seijas' home-- in which her name is misspelled. She was asked how she would feel if someone sued to take her home away because of an innocent mistake. Seijas would only answer, "I had it (name) corrected."
Seijas' lawyer, Kendall Coffey, countered that precise rules for recall petition paperwork are in place to protect the sanctity of elections—like the re-election bid Seijas won in 2008.
Coffey said, "When you are trying to undo an election that happened two years ago you have to follow the law."
