Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) on Monday accused Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman of wanting to commit voter fraud after he said he opposes mandatory voter ID.
Scott, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, spoke to Sean Hannity about a few key midterm races, predicting confidently that the GOP will win back control of the upper chamber of Congress despite Democratic-friendly changes in the forecast over the last month. Hannity, apparently still aggrieved that Fetterman hasn’t agreed to come on his show to debate him, began the segment by criticizing the Keystone State’s lieutenant governor after threatening him with legal action just last week in response to the Fetterman campaign using Hannity’s name in a fundraising email.
“John, by the way, I see you’re fundraising again off of my name. Come on the show, bring your hoodie, bring your tattoos, tough guy, and we’ll talk about your positions and your own words,” the Fox host challenged. “We’ve never told a single lie about you. What you are guilty of is called slander and libel.”
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Hannity then mentioned a FoxNews.com story from earlier in the day about Fetterman’s opposition to voter ID laws. The story quoted Fetterman as being against them because “there are tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians who typically are on the poorer side and are people of color that are less likely to have their ID at any one given time.”
Scott reacted to the story first by seeking to assure Fox viewers that Dr. Mehmet Oz is a “great” candidate and the “best health care talk show host in the world.” Scott, who has differed on some issues with Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), was perhaps motivated by McConnell’s recent suggestion that the quality of Republican candidates in Senate races could be better. (Oz himself pushed back against that notion on Fox Business Network last week.)
Fetterman is “soft on crime,” Scott claimed. “He wants to let, what, a third of the felons out right now. He wants to legalize drugs, he wants to kill jobs by banning fracking. He wants to commit fraud in the election by… getting rid of voter ID. I mean, this guy’s a radical.”
Fetterman, who mocked Republican politicians after the 2020 election by pointing to GOP instances of voter fraud, also said last summer that universal voter ID requirements are “insidious and unnecessary.”
