Florida House candidate Alian Collazo said he’s moved to Kendall. His voter registration still lists an address in Largo.
Just before launching his campaign in March for a Florida House seat representing south Miami-Dade County, Alian Collazo reported that he’d moved out of the house he owns in Largo and into a new residence inside the district: the family home of his former boss and longtime friend, state Sen. Alexis Calatayud.
But was the senator’s former chief of staff actually residing at her home?
To find out, the Times/Herald knocked on the door. The answer, delivered by the senator’s father, was no.
Tony Calatayud, the senator’s father, now denies ever saying that Collazo did not reside at the family’s house just south of Kendall, in Florida’s 115th House District. But the doorstep interaction casts doubt on where Collazo has claimed to live — and registered to vote — during his campaign to win the Republican primary for an open seat in the Florida Legislature.
Where a candidate for state Legislature lives matters in Florida, where the state Constitution requires that a candidate be a resident of the district “from which elected,” often interpreted as a requirement to live inside the district by Election Day in November. The address a person lists on their voter registration is also of consequence, given that submitting false information can be considered a third-degree felony. In 2017, Miami lawmaker Daisy Baez resigned her seat in the Florida House and pleaded guilty to perjury after prosecutors said she lied about living in a condo in her district where, in fact, she’d never spent a single night.
Collazo says he is being honest about the 10 weeks he says he spent at the family’s home while “engaged in the process of looking for a permanent residence.” On May 8, he switched his voter registration again, according to Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections records, this time to a house in Palmetto Bay in the district, where he says he now lives.
“My campaign remains fully focused on engaging with voters and spreading our positive message from Westchester to Pinecrest to Palmetto Bay and Cutler Bay,” Collazo, 29, told the Times/Herald in an emailed statement.
Sen. Calatayud, who is also registered to vote at the family home, declined to comment through a Senate spokesperson.
Though Calatayud’s father now denies it, he told a Times/Herald reporter during a brief interaction outside the family’s house on July 18 that the home — owned by the senator’s mother, Maria Calatayud — had never been Collazo’s residence.
When the reporter explained that the Calatayud house was formerly listed as Collazo’s residence on his voter file from February to May, while motioning to a Collazo campaign sign lying on the front porch, Tony Calatayud again denied that the home had been Collazo’s residence.
But after the Times/Herald began contacting Collazo and the state senator to ask about the discrepancy, Tony Calatayud sent an email saying that he “never stated that Alian Collazo never resided at” their home.
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