Florida Gov. Rick Scott( R) appeared on Fox News Sunday the weekend after the midterm elections and accused his dissident, Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, of trying to commit fraud.
Since election night on Tuesday, Scott has accused Democrats of trying to “steal” the Senate election by weighing thousands of lawful absentee and provisional votes shed in the state’s most populous districts. At a press conference late last week, Scott accused his stiffening lead on voter fraud.
“No rag-tag group of radical activists or advocates from D.C. will be allowed to steal the parliamentary elections from the voters in the State of Florida ,” he said.
Fox News host Chris Wallace queried the governor on Sunday if he had any evidence to endorsement his assertion. Predictably, he did not, but that didn’t stop him from directly accusing Nelson of fraud.
” Sen. Nelson is clearly trying to commit fraud to try to win this election, that’s all this is ,” he said, to an distrustful Wallace.
Scott, still failing to present any evidence of fraud, then proceeded to lie about what is actually transpiring in his own state.
“[ Sen. Nelson’s] advocate said that a non-citizen have chosen to vote, that’s one ,” said Scott, falsely.
” He’s gone to visitation and said that sham votes should be counted. Ballots have already been hurled out because they were not done accurately, he says those should be counted .”
” And you think that is the senator himself is dedicating hoax ?” invited a stupefied Wallace.
” Well, it’s his unit ,” said Scott, leaving the host momentarily speechless.
Addressing Scott’s allegations in order: The induce recount attorney for Sen. Nelson’s campaign, Marc Elias, did not say non-citizens should be allowed to vote. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Scott’s accusation stems from a single unofficial field transcript in which an unidentified advocate, playing on his own, invoked an indeterminate objection to a evaluate throwing out a single referendum because the voter in question was a non-citizen.
Immediately after the incident, Elias told reporters, unequivocally, “The lawyer who was present was not someone we had authorized to making this an dissent. Non-citizens cannot vote in U.S. polls .”
Second, Scott appears to be equivocating” fraudulent votes” — that is, ballots being deliberately submitted illegally — and referendums that were” not done accurately .” There are very important distinctions between the two, and as yet , nobody — Scott included — put forward any evidence to intimate a single fraudulent ballot has been counted.
Instead, Scott is alleging Floridians of uttering mistakes when replenishing out their legitimate referendums, mistakes which the Nelson campaign says shouldn’t certainly disqualify a voter from having his or her vote weighed. One of the most frequent of these is the so-called ” signature trouble .”
If a mail-in vote is missing a signature, or if the signature on the ballot doesn’t perfectly accord the signature that the state has on file — signatures which, in a number of cases, is also possible years, or even decades old-fashioned — an electoral work can deem that referendum invalid. It might seem like an easy mistake to avoid, but even onetime Congressman Patrick Murphy, who represented Florida’s 18 th neighborhood for four years, had his 2018 referendum governed invalid because of the signature law.
Another common matter is voter enrollments that were submitted or received after the state deadline. If a voter didn’t see the October 9 registration deadline, his or her ballot was likewise propelled out on Election Day. One illustrious Floridian is now addressing the issue of territory after officials disposed her referendum: onetime Trump administration official Omarosa Manigault Newman.
Lawyers for Nelson and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum are arguing that many of these thrown-away ballots should be re-examined to ensure lawful polls aren’t thrown out.
Opponents of the democratic election process, like Scott and others, to strive to draw the transfer boundaries as a mysterious speciman of elections being “found,” but as Sen. Nelson himself said in response to those accusations last week,” votes are not being encountered, they’re being weighed .”
Many of these mail-in ballots now being weighed are assigned by military service representatives performing overseas or on bases out of state, and more, on Veteran’s Day, Gov. Scott insisted that those military voters — and thousands of others — shouldn’t be counted at all.
Despite his repeated insistence of foul play, Scott’s own Department of Law Enforcement has said they have yet to open such investigations in such matters, because Scott’s campaign has failed to present any specific instance of fraud that can be investigated.
Read more: thinkprogress.org
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