A year ago this coming week, Alex de la Portilla was one of 4 candidates who was running for the county commission seat vacated by Bruno Barreiro.

He came in a distant third, and that would have been the end of it had it not been alleged by Steven Miro, a former staffer that Miami City Commissioner Joe Carollo had spent taxpayer money to host a series of events at community centers and nursing homes in his district to promote de la Portilla's candidacy.

An investigation into those allegations has supposedly been going on since that information was revealed last summer, and like everyone else, I've been waiting to see what the results of that investigation would be.

Now, a year after the campaign ended, I was provided information from the de la Portilla's campaign communicate system that appears to have been maintained on Whatsap, and was used during that campaign.

It's a program that de la Portilla himself introduced to his campaign workers, informing them in the process that their conversations would be protected from beginning to end.

Obviously no one figured that a disgruntled campaign worker would download the conversations, and pass them along to someone like me, because in addition to the usual back and forth mundane campaign chit chat that you would expect, several photographs of absentee ballots were included with the text messages, and the captions on the photos and the corresponding text messages appear to support a claim that on at least two separate occasions campaign workers stole and destroyed absentee ballots that would have been cast for de la Portilla's opponents..

Here is the first one.

In the accompanying transcript to this photo, which matches the date/time stamp of, 5/16/2018 12:33 p.m., you see that it says, "Eliminada," which translates to, 'Eliminated,' followed by "Jajajajaja," which again translates into, 'Hahahahaha.'

Miami has a long and unsavory history of various kinds of absentee ballot fraud, but this is the first time that I have personally seen evidence that points to ballots being seized and destroyed by campaign workers.

This raises the question of how much of this activity occurred, and how much was Alex de la Portilla aware of?

These were after all HIS campaign workers, and the software that they used to communicate these apparent efforts of ballot tampering is software that he had told them was safe, from portal to portal?

Can he claim with any degree of believability that he never saw any of these instructions to destroy ballots?  And what about others at the top of his campaign team?  It was obviously somebody with authority in the campaign who wrote, "Tear up the ballot good."

Alex de la Portilla is currently running for the District 1 City Commission seat that is being vacated by Willie Gort, who is termed out.  I wonder if he's still using the campaign staff and same WhatsApp software?

It's Miami, Bitches!

The message under this photo says:

        'Stolen, hahahaa. I did not give it to the lady but what do

        we do if she voted for Zoraida????'

The date/time stamp on the above image is 5/11/18 1:22 p.m., and it corresponds to the section of the text transcript below that responds to the question of what to do with the ballot..

The rough English translation of the exchange after the highlighted Red line goes as follows.

                  Tear up the ballot good.

                  Are you sure?

                  Take it to (Blacked Out).

                  Take it better.

                  She will know what to do.

                  Okay, perfect!

                  Three thumbs Up - Two Happy Faces

                  Take it to (Blacked Out Location) at the end. Please make            

                  sure that nobody sees it.          

                  Thumbs Up

                  Got it.

                  Thank God we took away votes from two democrats.

The last line implies that in addition to the above absentee ballot, there was another ballot that was also intercepted and destroyed.

Here is the second absentee ballot that by the time it was seized by one of de la Portilla's campaign workers had already been marked for Zoraida Barreiro, with the caption that says, "Byebye"