Despite desperate efforts by Democrats to overturn the decision of Florida’s voters – and despite the state’s deeply flawed, mismanaged and corrupt election system – it’s now clear that Republican Ron DeSantis will be the state’s next governor and Republican Gov. Rick Scott will be its next U.S. senator.
While a hand recount is still underway in Scott’s race against incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, “Nelson was left with almost no chance of pulling off a comeback to retain his seat” because Scott was leading by more than 12,000 votes, the Washington Post reported. And Florida’s machine recount of votes showed DeSantis more than 33,000 votes ahead of Democratic Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum – a margin too large to mandate a hand recount.
Democrats who refuse to accept that DeSantis will be governor and that Scott is heading to the Senate are refusing to accept reality. Their complaints against Republicans are absurd and simply the whining of sore losers unable to accept responsibility for their losses.
The reality in Florida is that the state’s voting system is badly broken. U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, who is presiding in one of several lawsuits arising out of the Nov. 6 midterm elections, was right when he recently said: “We have been the laughingstock of the world, election after election, and we chose not to fix this.”
Why does Florida have so many problems counting votes and determining which votes should count?
There are three issues involved in determining which votes are valid.
The first issue is voter fraud. This can involve someone voting who does not have the right to vote, such as a person who is not a U.S. citizen. It can also involve someone voting more than once, such as a person who moves to a new community but is still registered to vote from his or her previous residence. Fraud can also take place when a person pretends to be someone else – such as a voter who has died – and votes under that false identity.
The second issue is election interference or tampering. This is where a person or entity acts improperly to influence voters or the counting of votes. This can involve many things, such as: foreign interference in an election; computer hacking to alter voter databases; tampering with equipment that records votes; and creating front groups to put out false information on social media, in ads, in mailings, in robocalls and in other ways.
The third issue is voter suppression. This involves efforts to discourage or prevent voters from casting ballots. Democrats accuse Republicans of this because Republicans favor measures to prevent voter fraud, such as requiring voters to present a form of identification when casting ballots. The Democratic claim makes no sense. Requirements for an ID are not voter suppression – they are just commonsense steps to ensure people don’t vote if they are ineligible, don’t vote using false identities and don’t vote more than once. True voter suppression took place in the past, usually by Democrats in the South, to deny African-Americans the vote. And the votes of women were suppressed before they were granted the right to vote nationwide by the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920.
Historically, Democrats have shown they are willing to do just about anything to win elections. Republicans must quit taking the high road and fight back with everything we have.
Democrats have long been the party of voter fraud. The line “vote early and often” describes the Democratic Party machine in Chicago (the original line has even been attributed to gangster Al Capone, although nobody knows). Chicago has also been a place where the grateful dead have been more of an election force than a rock band. There, as in other major urban population centers, Democrats have used voter fraud as a way to retain and consolidate power.
Today the voter fraud issue centers around letting non-citizens have access to the ballot box. Despite media claims that there is no evidence of this happening, the truth is that there is plenty of observational evidence from around the country that it is. Letting non-citizens vote jeopardizes our principles as a nation. They vote only for entitlement, not for their own responsibility as citizens.
Election interference and vote tampering certainly appear to have occurred in Broward County in Florida in the recent midterm elections.
Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes, a Democrat who has held the position since 2003, has a long history of duplicitous behavior. As NPR – hardly a tool of the Republican Party – recently reported: “Accusations of bias and incompetence have followed Snipes for years.”
And yet Snipes continues to be allowed to serve because a majority of people living in predominantly Democratic Broward County apparently believe the ends justify the means when it comes to counting votes in order to favor Democrats.
The intellectual dishonesty of Democrats trying win elections they actually lost in Florida and elsewhere is staggering. Make no mistake, the only thing that these Democrats care about is winning this election in this moment. They don’t care that by doing whatever is needed to win they are undermining our entire system of government.
Banana Republic is a great clothing store but a lousy place to live. This is the kind of behavior we see in such nations.
Republicans need to understand there is no high road to take here. We need to be as aggressive as we legally can be, and any politician subjected to Democratic tactics designed to improperly win elections cannot ever concede or withdraw.
Democrats know the mathematics of being able to “flip” just a few votes in every voting location. With over 113,000 voting sites in the United States it doesn’t take much.
We should all be grateful to the Founding Fathers for our electoral system. We need to be vigilant in protecting it in the face of attacks by Democrats that are stronger than ever.
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