Former Rep. Allen West appeared on “The Hagee Hotline” today, where he alleged that he lost his seat in Congress back in 2012 because of rampant voter fraud in his district in Florida.
Matthew Hagee asked West for his thoughts on whether the upcoming election could be “rigged” and West responded that it was entirely possible because it happened to him.
“I think that we do have a problem with the integrity of our electoral process,” West said. “I lost an election in 2012, a congressional election back in Florida, and we came to find out in one country—St. Lucie County—they had precincts that were reporting 112 percent voter turnout. Now, I went to the University of Tennessee and I’m not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, some people may say, but I don’t know how you can have 112 percent voter turnout.”
West’s claim, of course, is totally false, as we noted several years ago:
When Allen West lost his seat in Congress in 2012, his supporters immediately cried voter fraud based on a claim that one county in his Florida district had reported 141 percent of its registered voters turning out to the polls. The claim was bogus, because the 141 percent figure was misleading.
The actual turnout in the county was 69.56 percent, while the 141 percent figure represented the number of “cards cast.”
Since the ballot was two pages long, every voter cast two cards, hence the initial report that the number of “cards cast” amounted to 141 percent of registered voters.
Even the voter-fraud obsessed group True the Vote notes that in “St. Lucie County, ballots were at least two pages or ‘cards.’ Policy dictates that each card be counted separately, leading to a total of 247,383 ‘votes’, aka cards, cast. Divide the number by half, then exhale.”
