Florina Governor's Pretend Election 'Review'

Florida's Republican Governor Rick Scott's announcement yesterday would be somewhat akin to George W. Bush asking then FEMA Chief, Michael "Heckuva Job" Brown to head up a review of how FEMA and the Federal government performed in responding to Hurricane Katrina. Or, perhaps asking Karl Rove or Dick Cheney to get to the bottom of that whole Valerie Plame outing thing.

The only worse, less independent person who could possibly be chosen to head up a "review" of what went wrong in this year's disastrous election in Florida would be Scott himself.

But since his hand-picked Sec. of State Ken Detzner carried out every single one of Scott's horrendous, un-American orders to restrict voting and voter registration and to try and toss eligible voters off the rolls this year, resulting in even active-duty military voters getting purged, all while ignoring actual, massive voter registration fraud carried out by the Republican Party of Florida itself (until it could no longer be ignored), it may as well be Scott himself in charge of this so-called "review" in which Detzner has been assigned to tell us all why it was that, among other things, voters were still in line trying to cast their votes at 2am on Wednesday morning in Miami-Dade, even as the President of the United States was delivering his re-election victory speech in Chicago.

Heckuva job, Scottie!

Scott has already, repeatedly since Election Day, declared that he did "the right thing" by slashing Early Voting from 14 days to just 8 in Florida this year, and then refusing to expand those hours on the weekend before the election -- unlike both of his Republican predecessors Governors Charlie Crist and even Jeb Bush -- once it became clear that voters were standing in line for 6, 7 hours and longer simply trying to cast their vote...

In a separate interview with WKMG (which is not embeddable here), Scott offered the exact same pre-rehearsed "the right thing happened" line over and over again when asked about the disaster by reporters.

Add to that the broader national finding from a Hart Research survey released the day after Election Day finding that Democrats, minorities and Obama supporters were far more likely to stand in long lines trying to vote across the country than were Republicans and white voters...

While a real independent review of what happened in Florida -- and elsewhere in the country -- is certainly needed, frankly, so is a criminal investigation of the attempted voter suppression by both Gov. Rick Scott and his Sec. of State Ken Detzner in the Sunshine State, as well as by other Republican Governors and Secretaries of States in Ohio, Virginia, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, Iowa and a number of other states this year.

So who will be stepping up for those reviews? If the President was serious on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning during his victory speech when he declared "we have to fix" the problem of voters standing in line for hours on end just to vote, then might we recommend he start by directing his Dept. of Justice to begin a criminal investigation of this national disgrace -- and this direct, purposeful, unapologetic assault on the most sacred American value of democracy -- immediately.

ENDS

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