Watters on felons voting: Dems want to 'change the rules' rather than 'change their message'

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Gutfeld on Bernie Sanders letting felons vote from prison

Just days after the deadly Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka, Democrats tackle stuff that truly matters: Should felons be able to vote?

Jesse Watters, co-host of "The Five," suggested Tuesday that Democrats wanted to grant felons voting rights so they could "change the rules" in American elections.

"The reason they're doing this ... is because they can't persuade enough actual voters about their ideas so they have to create new voters," he said on "The Five." "They got rocked in 2016 so instead of trying to change their message, they're just trying to change the rules."

Watters likened that proposal to Democratic pushes to abolish the electoral college and add justices to the Supreme Court.

Co-host Juan Williams responded by noting that Democrats won the popular vote in 2016. "Democrats got more votes than Republicans in 2016." "All of them were felons," co-host Greg Gutfeld joked in response.

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Watters' comments came after Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the frontrunner among declared Democratic candidates as of Tuesday, indicated he would be willing to let Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev vote as part of his plan to extend that right to felons in prison.

Regardless of what Democrats intended, Watters predicted that policy would ruin their electoral prospects. "They just handled Donald Trump the wedgiest of wedge issues," he said before asking Williams if Democrats actually wanted to lose in 2020. "This is made to order for Donald Trump," Watters added.

Sanders' proposal, Watters suggested, would result in corruption and fraud. "[Democrats] have totally undercut their messaging on election integrity," he said.

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Sanders, who faced a wave of criticism for his proposal, defended felons' voting rights as part of American democracy. "I think the right to vote is inherent to our democracy," he said Monday.

"Yes, even for terrible people, because once you start chipping away and you say, ‘That guy committed a terrible crime, not gonna let him vote. Well, that person did that. Not gonna let that person vote,’ you’re running down a slippery slope," he added.

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According to polling from April, Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden gathered the most support of Democratic voters in New Hampshire. Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have both called for a restoration of felons' voting rights after their release from prison. Buttigieg, however, disagreed with Sanders' proposal to let felons vote while they remained in prison.