Rubio Claims Democrats Want to "Steal" the Florida Elections By Counting All Votes

Lying Marco wants to ignore possible Democrat votes.

The more I see and hear about Marco Rubio anti-democratic bloviating, the more despicable I findA case in point is Rubio - and other Republicans' whining about the recounts that will likely take place in Florida's gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races where it seems that a significant number of votes were not counted.  From the additional votes discovered so far, the winning margins of the supposed Republican victors have shrunk to under the threshold for a manual recount.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at Rubio's shameless effort to have votes not counted.  Here re article highlights:

On Tuesday night in Florida, Democratic senator Bill Nelson conceded a Senate race to Republican Rick Scott, because he was trailing the Florida governor by more than 57,000 voters. Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, meanwhile, conceded Florida’s governor race to Republican Ron DeSantis, because he was trailing the congressman by an even larger margin.

And then, Nelson and Gillum discovered that there were more outstanding votes from heavily Democratic counties than they had realized. By Thursday afternoon, Nelson’s deficit had fallen to just 17,000, or 0.22 percent. State law requires a manual recount of any election with an initial margin under 0.25 percent. Gillum’s deficit, meanwhile, fell to 38,000, or 0.47 percent, which is under the 0.5 percent threshold that triggers an automatic machine recount, under state law.

More significantly (and alarmingly), irregularities began to emerge in Nelson’s pattern of support. Specifically, an aberrant percentage of voters in Broward County marked their ballots for gubernatorial candidates — but left the Senate ballot-line blank.

[U]ndervoting in the Senate race was especially pronounced in Florida’s 24th Congressional District, where no House race was listed (as the incumbent ran unopposed), and thus the Senate race box was even lower down on the ballot’s left-hand side. . . . it is also possible that vote-processing machines in Broward suffered a technical glitch that caused them not to read Senate votes that were properly marked on paper ballots — and if that is the case, then a recount would very likely tip the Senate race to Nelson.

For this and other reasons, lawyers for Nelson and Gillum decided to call on the state of Florida to honor its statutory obligation to perform a recount.

In response, Florida senator Marco Rubio decided to accuse the Democratic Party of conspiring with Broward County election officials to illicitly overturn the will of the electorate, and illegitimately install Bill Nelson into the U.S. Senate.

Rubio offered no evidence to support the claim that Democratic lawyers have been very clear that they don’t want every vote to count, and are merely seeking to win the election by any means necessary (even if that involves not counting all the votes), nor did he specify what “ongoing” violations of the law Broward County election officials were engaged in. He also neglected to mention that the election supervisor who is supposedly trying to rig the election for Nelson was appointed by former Republican governor (and Rubio ally) Jeb Bush.

Many #NeverTrump conservatives like to fantasize about a world in which Marco Rubio won the 2016 GOP nomination — and, as a result, the Republican Party retained its commitment to civility over demagoguery, and democratic ideals over the raw pursuit of power. There are many problems with this fantasy. But two conspicuous ones are that Rubio spent much of his 2016 campaign baselessly accusing America’s first black president of deliberately sabotaging the country (“he knows exactly what he’s doing”); and that he is now telling his supporters, without evidence, that if Bill Nelson wins a recount they should regard the outcome of the 2018 Florida Senate race as illegitimate.

Which suggests that an affinity for reckless demagoguery, and hostility to liberal democratic norms, weren’t qualities that Trump introduced to Republican politics — they were actually embedded deep inside the party all along.