Two South Florida women were arrested Friday morning after allegedly committing election fraud, according to the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office.
Gladys Coego, 74, and Tomika Curgil, 33, were arrested in unrelated incidents in Miami-Dade, authorities said.
Coego faces two counts of marking or designating on the ballot of another, while Curgil faces five counts of submitting false voter registration information.
Coego was booked into the Miami-Dade jail where she was being held on $10,000 bond Friday, records showed. Curgil was being held on $125,000 bond. It's unknown if they've hired attorneys.
"Our law enforcement effort against these election law violators was swift and resulted in an immediate arrest of the wrongdoers," Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle. "Anyone who attempts to undermine the democratic process should recognize that there is an enforcement partnership...in place to thwart such efforts and arrest those involved."
According to the state attorney's office, Coego had been hired by the Miami-Dade Elections Department Monday as a temporary election support specialist.
A staff member and a supervisor later caught her unlawfully marking some absentee ballots, officials said.
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Election support specialists are prohibited from bringing pens or pencils into the ballot sorting room but Coego had concealed a pen in her purse, officials said.
She later admitted she had marked a number of absentee ballots involving the Miami-Dade mayoral race that had been left blank, marking each for Raquel Regalado.
Regalado is battling incumbent Carlos Gimenez for the position.
Coego didn't give any explanation for her actions and investigators were unable to directly connect her to any of the campaigns, officials said.
Curgil was arrested in an unrelated incident after the Miami-Dade Elections Department uncovered discrepancies in a number of new voter applications submitted to them by People United for Medical Marijuana, officials said.
Curgil, who was hired as a canvasser to register voters for People United for Medical Marijuana, allegedly submitted voter registrations to the elections department for people who couldn't be verified as qualified voters.
Police discovered Coego didn't leave her home during a day of work and then submitted completed and falsified voter registration forms, officials said.
Among the discrepancies in the forms were that Coego had registered people who were deceased, officials said.
"The person in question was an hourly subcontractor to a vendor hired by the campaign to register Florida voters. Despite having protocols in place for training, quality control and pre-verifications of collected registrations, the registrations submitted by the person in question seem to have slipped through the cracks," United for Care said in a statement. "The campaign is cooperating fully with the State's Attorney's investigation."
