Trump is telling Florida to ignore military ballots. Happy Veterans Day.
Trump is telling Florida to ignore military ballots. Happy Veterans Day.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/11/12/trump-is-telling-florida-ignore-military-ballots-happy-veterans-day/?noredirect=on&utm_source=reddit.com&utm_term=.d711737c7250
By Adam Weinstein at the Washington Post
"SNIP.....
Early Monday morning, after returning from a European commemoration of the end of World War I and as Americans awoke to observe the Veterans Day holiday, President Trump announced a bold new strategy: refusing to recognize the votes of U.S. service members stationed overseas.
“The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged,” the commander in chief tweeted. “An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”
Trump, who has long argued without evidence that there was widespread voting fraud in the election that he won in 2016, was riffing off the tune played by Scott, Florida’s sitting governor, who leads his race to unseat incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson by less than 13,000 votes out of nearly 8.2 million votes counted. The slow pace of counting mail-in votes, particularly in urban (and blue-leaning) counties such as Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, has led Scott to claim on Fox News — against the opinion of Florida’s top law enforcement agency — that “Sen. Nelson is trying to commit fraud to win this election.” What evidence does Scott have? None, other than that the offending South Florida counties “came up with 93,000 votes after election night. We still don’t know how they came up with that.”
As it happens, we do know where those votes came from: Among other sources, many of the ballots that arrive after Election Day are cast by military service members, contractors and dependents deployed overseas. Scott — a Navy veteran whose own administration snubbed several Florida-born Medal of Honor recipients to nominate him for the state’s new Military Hall of Fame in 2011 — should have known that from his time aboard a Pacific-based frigate. Indeed, the state he represents is one of the friendliest states of the union when it comes to accommodating overseas and military voters: It requires ballots to be sent to deployed service members at least 45 days before Election Day, and it counts those votes as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day and received in the voter’s home county within 10 days of the election — in this case, Nov. 16. Florida, in fact, has historically had a higher percentage of military personnel request and return mail-in ballots than any other state in the union.
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