Thursday night, Sean Hannity hosted Rick Scott with the obvious purpose of hyping his sleazy attack on two Democratic counties in Florida that narrowed his lead in the U.S. Senate race to trigger a mandatory recount.
As the Associated Press explained, Scott’s lead in Florida’s Senate election “narrowed as final ballots in heavily Democratic Broward and Palm Beach counties were counted Wednesday and Thursday.” His lead is now under the 2.5 percentage point lead requiring a mandatory recount.
Scott, the current governor of Florida, responded by alleging, without any apparent evidence, rampant voter fraud. From The New York Times:
Standing on the steps of the Governor’s Mansion, Mr. Scott announced on Thursday night that his Senate campaign had sued the Democratic elections supervisors of Broward and Palm Beach Counties. He then asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which he helps oversee as governor, to investigate them.
“The people of Florida deserve fairness and transparency, and the supervisors are failing to give it to us,” Mr. Scott said. “Every Floridian should be concerned there may be rampant fraud happening in Palm Beach and Broward Counties.”
“We’ve all seen the incompetence and irregularities in vote tabulations in Broward and Palm Beach for years,” he added, “but here we go again. I will not sit idly by while unethical liberals try to steal this election from the great people of Florida.”
Predictably, that aroused Sean Hannity to step in and throw around his own unsubstantiated accusations. He hosted Scott on Fox News last night, called the matter, “the single biggest abuse of power in an election I have seen,” and pretended that there’s something fishy about a vote tally changing based on some previous possibly questionable behavior by one of the elections supervisors. That and the fact that Sen. Bill Nelson’s attorney, Marc Elias, is “the guy at the heart of the whole Perkins Coie, Fusion GPS, Clinton-bought-and-paid-for dossier.”
While Hannity posed as someone caring about the “just vote” of Floridians, he conveniently ignored the fact that the Broward elections supervisor he targeted said that a large volume of mail-in ballots, many received late Tuesday, was the cause for the slow counting.
From the Media Matters transcript:
SCOTT: Now it’s down to 15,000 votes, so it’s clear we got some left-wing activists, we have got some Democratic D.C. Lawyers, they’re down here for one purpose, to steal this election.
[…]
SCOTT: It sure appears they’re gonna keep finding as many votes as it takes to try to win this election.
[…]
HANNITY: I’m never seen anything like this in my life. It is obviously corrupt, obviously laws were broken, obviously there are shenanigans here. I believe you and Senator Rubio are 100 percent correct, we will follow this every single second of every day now, because the people of Florida deserve their just vote, which they got, and you won this race hands down.
And this is a disgrace that they get to do this, election in and election out. Somebody needs to go to jail here if this keeps happening. You keep violating the law, you don’t respond, every other county responds, then you change your numbers again and again and again, something is not right.
Predictably, that aroused the Twitter fingers of Hannity’s Fan in Chief. Donald Trump heard the words of his Bedtime BFF and unofficial chief of staff and took them as gospel. Hannity ended the Scott interview ended at about 9:32 ET. Less than 10 minutes later, Trump had tweeted:
Law Enforcement is looking into another big corruption scandal having to do with Election Fraud in #Broward and Palm Beach. Florida voted for Rick Scott!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 9, 2018
Watch what shapes our nation’s policy below, from the November 8, 2018 Hannity.
