Miami seems to be a forgiving town, politically speaking.

Miami-Dade Commissioner Xaver Suarez is a respected leader and viable contender for the county mayor’s post in 2020 despite having been removed from his Miami mayoral seat in 2007 due to widespread absentee ballot fraud in the 2006 city election.

Miami-Dade Commissioner Jose “Pepe” Diaz continues to sit there on the dais and sites the law and champions law enforcement even though he clearly beat a legitimate DUI rap in Key West last year. He was acquitted, but we’ve seen the video.

Former Hialeah Mayor Raul Martinez was re-elected three times after he was indicted and convicted on eight counts of extortion and racketeering (he appealed and was acquitted in 1996). He’s so past that history that he recently hosted none other than presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in his home.

And Ladra’s favorite former Congressman, David “Nine Lives” Rivera was re-elected after that incident where he allegedly ran a mail truck off the road to keep his opponents’ negative mailers from hitting voters’ mailboxes and, despite an alleged investigation that has gone on longer than most federal mafia racketeering cases, is still running for office as recently as last year. And probably next year.

Read related story: Commissioner Jose “Pepe” Diaz arrested on DUI charges in Key West

Now add political consultant Al Lorenzo to the political comebacks of the 305.

Lorenzo was the fall guy for the absentee ballot fraud scandal that engulfed the 2012 elections. Deisy Cabrera, the Hialeah boletera caught carrying ballots to and from Mayor Carlos Gimenez‘s Hialeah campaign office, had worked for Lorenzo in previous campaigns. Lorenzo (photographed right) claimed she wasn’t working for him in 2012, but he was fired from the mayoral campaign because the limelight exposed that he had hired an ex felon, Jerry Ramos, to work for him (read: he was fired for AB shenanigans but Gimenez didn’t want to admit that).

His other client, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez-Rundle — who never saw an absentee ballot fraud case she couldn’t summarily dismiss or otherwise turn her head to — didn’t fire Lorenzo, but told him to take Ramos off her campaign that year. She was facing a real challenge that year and couldn’t afford to lose the ABs.

Well, Lorenzo has been quietly working under the radar. Mostly on judicial campaigns, where there is very little media attention. Several sources close to Gimenez told Ladra that Lorenzo was involved in the re-election campaign last year (maybe getting paid via the $6,000 a month to former Miami Mayor Joe Carollo?) But last year, las malas lenguas say he was also involved in the campaign of founding first and now newly (again) elected Doral Mayor J.C. Bermudez. He is not on the Bermudez campaign reports either, but the idea is that he is Diez’s partner.

Read related story: Sasha Tirador may be losing her touch with absentee ballots

And 2017 promises to be good, too, because it looks like Lorenzo willl work on the campaign for Miami Commission candidate Ralph Rosado (who is filed for 2019 but will move to this year once Commissioner Francis Suarez resigns to run for mayor).

At least that is what one must assume from this photograph (left) posted on Facebook Wednesday by political consultant Fernando Diez, who helped elect Miami Commissioner Ken Russell as well as Bermudez. Russell was also in the photograph. Maybe Al helped the yoyo man, too (Russell’s father invented the yo-yo). Lorenzo is seated third on the left, next to Rosado’s wife (in pink).

“Happy to have spent my birthday with my wife Mariana Parra and good friends Ken Russell, Ralph Rosado,” post Diez, who is sitting next to Russell on the right side of the table at Casa Juancho Restaurant.

Ladra loves Rosado’s comment:  “The gang! We were very happy to have spent the evening with you as well. Happy birthday, Fernando!”

The gang indeed. Should we call them the Absentee Ballot Raiders?

And does this mean that former Miami-Dade Commissioner Pedro Reboredo, who resigned in 2001 after he was caught paying ghost employees for work that wasn’t being done, could run for office again. Of course it does!

Tuesday night’s loss in Doral was double whammy for political consultant Sasha Tirador, who worked for both incumbent Mayor Luigi Boria and council candidate Adriana Moyano, who both lost their runoff elections.

The victories by their opponents — JC Bermudez and Claudia Mariaca, respectively — was pretty solid, and that includes very comfy leads in absentee ballots.

Is the Absentee Ballot Queen losing her touch? Might she be dethroned? Or does her magic only work in Hialeah?

No, wait. There’s always Sweetwater, where she helped elect Mayor Orlando Lopez in 2015 after she left or was fired from the campaign of immediate past Mayor Jose M. Diaz.

Read related story: Voters replace Luigi Boria with first mayor, JC Bermudez

Boria was forced into a runoff Tuesday after he failed to get 50 percent plus one in the Nov. 8 election. He lost in every category — ABs, early voting and election day. In both rounds Nov. 8 and Tuesday. Although Boria was within 200 votes on Election Day this go-around, he was almost 1,000 short in early voting and exactly 1,100 under founding mayor J.C. Bermudez in absentees. 

Bermudez won Tuesday with a whopping 67% after he got 1,181 more ABs than Boria. Moyano lost in ABs by a smaller margin of 343 votes, smaller even than the margin of 529 she lost in the ABs on Nov. 8.

But these are just the latest two in a string of losses for Tirador.

Let’s remember that Tirador also worked on the Raquel Regalado campaign. And, much to Ladra’s dismay, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez got way more ABs in their runoff last month than the former Miami-Dade School Board Member who could have and should have been our first female county mayor —  — 147,885 to 118,754.

Even earlier this year, it looks like la reina lost every judicial race she worked on except one.

• Rosy Aponte lost in all three races — absentee, early voting and Election Day. But it’s worth noting that even after paying Tirador $16,000, according to campaign finance reports, for “consulting” and “community outreach,” she had fewer absentee ballot votes than the other two candidates in the first round. Her total ABs were 27,667. The guy who came in No. 2, Oscar Rodriguez-Fonts had almost 10,000 more and went on to win the runoff.
• Yoly Roberson, la enfermera, also lost all three races, but the margin was much closer in early voting and Election Day. Roberson, who paid Tirador more than $15,000 for consulting and “communication,” had 46,399 mail-in votes but was beaten by Robert Luck, whose AB count came in at 56,903.
• But her worse performance this year must be with Renee Gordon, who actually won early voting and Election Day tallies but lost so big in absentee ballots that she came in third and didn’t even make the runoff. We usually see this happen the other way around. Gordon got 19,863 absentee votes while the candidate with the next lowest got 25,842 and the eventually, Mark Blumstein, got 32,173 in round one. But maybe that’s because she only paid Sasha $6,400 for consulting and “grassroots.”

To be fair, each of these judicial race winners — Rodriguez-Fonts, Luck and Blumstein — hired election royalty of their own: Al Lorenzo, who was caught in the 2012 absentee ballot fraud investigation into the Carlos Gimenez campaign and has been working quietly behind the scenes since.

Maybe we should call him Al “Absentee Ballot King” Lorenzo?

Curiously, and notably, other members of the Gimenez 2012 team, Jesse Manzano and Dario Moreno, were spotted early Tuesday evening celebrating “the best team’s” win (pictured, left, in the bottom left corner of this picture posted on twitter). Could Lorenzo be part of that best team? After all, Lorenzo consulted for Frank Bolanos, who ran against Boria in 2012 and was endorsed by Bermudez. He’s not on Bermudez’s campaign reports. But that may not mean anything, because neither is Manzano, who was wearing a yellow Bermudez campaign t-shirt on Tuesday. Of course, as of this early Wednesday, Ladra does not know if Bermudez had a political action committee (but if Jesse is involved, he probably did).

And, hey, maybe they volunteered, ok?