pain of their own, but they were promoted by more than half a million dollars in advertising that was designed to appeal to democratic voters. the wording seemed to designed to syphon off votes from the democratic candidates in the races. and the republican candidates won all three of those senate races including one race in miami by 32 votes in which the the independent ghost candidate got more than 6,000 votes. and all of this happening while there s all this crowing about voter fraud that doesn t exist. jason s paper reports, quote, neither desantis nor gop leaders have released any proposal to increase penalties or crack down on the use of ghost candidates. what does it tell you about governor desantis true obsession with election fraud? well, it tells me that florida as we ve discussed on this program before, this is the laboratory, the test market, if you will, for what republican total control would look like in
real election crimes committed by his own party. republicans ran ghost candidates last year. consultants spent more than $1 million on these independent candidates steined to draw votes from democrats. two people including a former state senator now charged with campaign fraud over the scheme. new reporting from the ceptinal reveals dark money came from florida s biggest utility company. joining me now orlando ceptinal senior reporter jason garcia. jason, before we get to your newest reporting i want you to walk us through this. how did the ghost candidates change the outcome of the election? yeah, so what happened here is there were three really intense battleground races that were for the florida senate. the florida senate is 40 seats. these three races were seen as key to deciding which party would control them. and in those races three independent candidates qualified for the ballot who did no exam