Sunshine Sentinel

U.S. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said during a committee hearing yesterday that when he was elected two years ago, he dealt with a multitude of lawsuits by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) that caused him problems.

“Two years ago I got elected, I won on election night by 54,000 votes and Chuck Schumer sent a lawyer down and said, ‘I don't care what the votes are, we will win through the courts,’ so we went through unbelievable number of lawsuits, we had something like 1,000 lawyers working with us,” Scott said.

Scott said they went through two recounts and Schumer continued to fight to hopefully win through the courts. Scott wasn’t even allowed to come to orientation after being elected.

“So, I watch the stuff now, I did not remember one Democrat in this entire country say, ‘that is not right, you should not be doing it that way,’ they were all in on this and nobody complained,” Scott said. “We've got to figure out how to do this where people feel comfortable.”

Scott said constituents have voiced their concerns to him about the election in November.

“Of course these are people that wanted Trump to win and they think he lost unfairly, they are mad because they hear about what happened in Wisconsin and other states and then they’re so furious that the whole system is rigged,” Scott said. “In September I put out a bill called the Voter ID bill.”

Scott said in Florida, absentee voting is done right — voters have to be registered voters, they have to request their ballot early and turn it in on time, there is no voting after the fact and their signatures have to match. He said it’s on the voter to make sure it’s all done correctly.

“It seems to me if we want people to feel comfortable in this country that these elections are fair, you have to show your ID,” Scott said. “You cannot be doing same-day registration because how can you tell if somebody is legal, illegal and how would you know? Do they live in that state? How do you know? You have to be able to watch ballots being open, we had two election supervisors being removed because what they did in my election, they completely violated the law and tried to count 95,000 ballots after election night.”

Scott said he believes one of the reasons why the United States has good systems is because we don't have a national system, however he questioned if there should be national standards.

“Should you have to have ID? Should your signatures have to match? You can't get registered on the same day that you vote, all these things that we have, we do in Florida...” Scott said. 

Scott said it should also be announced how many ballots are there on election night because you should already know how many you have.