National Review

Op-Ed: Sen. Rick Scott

January 19, 2022

Despite winning the presidency, the House, and a tie in the U.S. Senate in 2020, Democrats have decided they cannot win any elections in the future unless they are rigged.

For the sake of honesty, the Democratic Party should change its name, as most Democrats have totally given up on democracy. Just look at the legislation that virtually every Democrat in Washington is pushing this week.

Despite winning the presidency, the House, and a tie in the U.S. Senate in 2020, Democrats have decided that they cannot win any elections in the future unless they are rigged. That’s why they are pushing a federal takeover of all elections, with radical left-wing rules imposed on every state and locality by the liberals in Washington, regardless of whether those changes increase the risk of election fraud.

America’s government was carefully designed by men who rightly feared centralized power. They devised an elegant set of checks and balances to ensure that federal governance required the consent of a majority of the states.

Democrats know they’re about to lose. And they’ve decided that they cannot ever win without the radical and unpopular policies they want to push on the American people. That’s why they have given up on democracy.

The Constitution clearly gives states the obligation to set election procedures. The courts have upheld wide state latitude in this regard. My state of Florida has long made use of early voting and absentee balloting: When I was elected in 2018, 31 percent of the voters cast their ballot early by mail or in-person, while in Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware that year, only 4 percent did so thanks to different rules. Our country’s Founders explicitly envisioned this kind of state-based discretion when it comes to election administration.

But Democrats today do not trust the voters. They do not believe the voters in states like Florida are on board with their left-wing proposals to fulfill their wildest socialist policy dreams. So they have decided to rig the game.

They want to end the sanctity of the secret ballot. Under Democratic proposals in Washington, your ballot could be “harvested” and deposited, and therefore perhaps influenced unduly, by a third party — like a union boss, or your employer, or anyone else who has power over you.

They want to end the certainty of Election Day results. Democrats want to keep counting ballots received (and in some instances submitted) well after Election Day — when partisan counters know exactly how many votes their side needs to win. Democrats want to give crooked election administrators the ability to keep “finding” and counting ballots for Democrats after Election Day until Democrats win — and they hardly deny it.

They want to make voter-identity theft easy. Democrats would outlaw the photo-I.D. requirements that are supported by three-fourths of Americans, and that guarantee no one can impersonate you and fraudulently cast your vote for you.

They want to end ballot security. Democrats would mandate that every locality mail ballots to the last known address of all registered voters, even if they’ve moved, and even if those ballots are likely to end up scattered on the floor of an apartment building’s mailroom to be picked up and cast by charlatan political operatives. Once ballots are sent to people who did not request them, they can easily be cast by people who were not meant to receive them.

They want to end community representation. Democrats would mandate that states no longer get to draw their own districts, through elected representatives, to keep communities together. Under their plan, congressional district drawing will be rigged by Washington — to achieve Washington’s objectives, not your community’s.

They want to force you to pay for political ads. Democrats would give away tax dollars to political campaigns. They not only want to pick how you choose your congressmen; they want to make you pay for it, too.

Democracy is a precious gift that has rarely lasted whenever it has been tried on planet earth because despots and authoritarians cannot resist trying to rig it to maintain power. Our Founders knew that, and they installed vital circuit-breakers in the system to prevent this gathering of power by election-riggers — vesting power to administer elections and make election rules in the states, and giving the states equal power in the Senate, regardless of their size.

As lovers of freedom and defenders of democracy, we must work to preserve this system. And the Democrats who have given up on democracy need to reverse course — or find a new name.

RICK SCOTT is the junior U.S. senator from Florida. He served as Florida’s governor from 2011 to 2019.

Read more: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/democrats-are-the-anti-democracy-party/