posted 11-19-2018 09:47 AM                  

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.

posted 11-19-2018 09:51 AM                  

By Adam Shaw | Fox News
Lawyers for the Florida Democratic gubernatorial and Senate candidates objected Friday to the rejection of a provisional ballot cast by a noncitizen, according to a transcript obtained by Fox News.

The incident occurred during a canvassing meeting Friday in Palm Beach County, where provisional ballots were being examined. According to the draft transcript of the meeting, taken by a court reporter hired by the Florida Republican Party, a provisional ballot was ordered excluded from the count, as it came from a non-U.S. citizen.

“First one of these we’ve seen,” said Judge August Bonativa.

“Not a U.S. citizen, not counted.” said Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher, according to the transcript.

It was at this point where lawyers representing Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum and Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., issued objections -- although they did not give reasons for those objections. The objections were noted, but the vote was still not counted.

The Nelson campaign distanced itself from the objections, which it said that it had not authorized.

“The lawyer who was present was not someone we had authorized to make such an objection. Noncitizens cannot vote in U.S. elections," Marc Elias, recount attorney for the Nelson campaign, said in a statement. The Gillum campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The controversy comes amid a broader fight over the Senate and gubernatorial races, in which leads for Republicans have shrunk, leading the state’s secretary of state to order a recount on Saturday.

Republicans have questioned the handling of the votes, particularly in Palm Beach and Broward counties, and have pointed to past controversies in Broward in particular as evidence that voter fraud may be underway. On Saturday, President Trump said Democrats were “trying to STEAL two big elections in Florida!”

Democrats have claimed that Republicans are trying to stop all the votes from being counted as the race has started to favor the Democrats.

Republicans saw Friday’s objection in Palm Beach County as an indication of the tactics Democrats were prepared to use.

“We think it is a sign of desperation and goes to demonstrate the tactics that the Democrats, especially the Florida Democratic Party, Andrew Gillum’s campaign and Bill Nelson’s campaign, will resort to to steal this election from the rightful winners -- Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis,” Michael Barnett, chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party, told Fox News.

“It’s shameful, there’s no excuse for objecting to the rejection of a non-U.S. citizen vote, but this is just one example of the shenanigans and corruption we’ve seen from the Democrats in Florida for so many years. We will not let them steal this election from us,” he said.