Senator Luthor Proposes Escalation of Longstanding Florida Tradition
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Medicare scam artist and cartoon villain Rick Scott is putting the quiet parts into an actual legislative proposal:
Last week, President Donald Trump said he was “counting on the federal court system to make it so” that whatever preliminary tally is complete on Election Day will be validated as the final vote count, meaning states would not have the opportunity to count the anticipated record-high numbers of mail-in ballots. This would functionally end American democracy. And it appears that other Republicans are going all in on the idea that we should just not count actual votes.
On Thursday, Florida Sen. Rick Scott proposed a bill that would change election laws with less than six weeks to go until November’s election, causing complete mayhem and ensuring that untold numbers of otherwise valid votes would not be counted. Scott’s proposal is simple and entirely unworkable. His Help America Vote Act of 2020 would require that mail-in ballots be counted within 24 hours of when voting closes on Election Day. Scott’s proposed legislation would also prevent mail-in ballots received prior to Election Day from being processed and counted until the morning of Nov. 3, contradicting state election statutes across the country including one that he signed when he was governor of Florida. Basically, the bill would move back the date by which votes can start to be counted and move up the date by which the count must end. This would limit the count to a single less-than-48-hour window, shortening the count in some cases by weeks. In Scott’s own home state of Florida, as one example, votes can start to be counted up to 22 days before Election Day. In Colorado, which does all mail-in voting, they can be processed as soon as they are received and counted 15 days before Election Day. Under Scott’s law, those votes would all have to begin to be counted on Election Day itself. Any votes that did not get counted simply would not count.
This isn’t going to become law, obviously, but it makes clear how much of the party is going to be behind Trump’s strategy to de-legitimize mail-in ballots.
As Michelle Goldberg says, be angry, not despairing. Republicans plainly think they’re losing, and the bigger Biden’s margin the harder it will be to steal the election.