#6: Rick Scott
It's sad that, in America, the expectation is now for politicians to lie to the people.
This is made even more depressing by the fact that some politicians don't even care if the American people can tell for themselves if they are being lied to or not.
There are plenty of offenders to whom this nomination could have gone, but the most high-profile repeat offender would have to be Rick Scott of Florida.
There is a very real possibility, after all, that the nonsense Scott was pushing for against all evidence to the contrary could have influenced the outcome of the election.
Scott's first foray into blatant stupidity in the last four years came in the form of a bill requiring mandatory drug testing for welfare.
In a CNN interview, Scott asserted that "Studies show that people that are on welfare are higher users of drugs than people not on welfare" and "the bottom line is, if they're not using drugs, it's not an issue."
However, preliminary figures show that just 2.5% of applicants tested positive for drugs, with 2% declining to take the test.
Adding insult to injury for Scott and his supporters, the results of the rejected applicants were a paltry $60,000 in savings for a program that cost the state an estimated $178,000,000 to implement.
Scott had tried to sell the program on promoting fiscal responsibility, but something as simple as weighing the cost of the welfare program against the cost of the testing program -- something as simple as basic arithmetic -- would have shown that the program would not save money for the state even in the libertarian fantasy outcome of 100% of applicants being rejected.
It was, in this sense, an expensive solution for a problem that was almost nonexistent to begin with.
This would become a pattern for Scott.
More infamously, Scott attempted to purge Florida's pool of eligible voters, mostly of minorities and other typically Democratic-leaning demographics.
Scott cited "voter fraud" as his reason, even though the Justice Department under President Bush spent five years investigating voter fraud in the United States and turned up only 120 cases of voter fraud nation wide.
When Rick Scott's attempted purge began, his list of ineligible voters included 182,000 names. By late June, it had shrunk to 2,700.
Even in spite of having been caught like this and exposed comically on the national level, Scott continued to try to force the outcome of Florida's election, most prominently by refusing to extend early voting and under-preparing polling stations in Miami-Dade, resulting in some residents reporting that they had to wait as much as nine hours to vote.
Most recently, Scott turned down the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act by citing costs of "$63 billion over 10 years, with the state paying $26 billion of that."
He got this number from a report by his adviser, Michael Anway, that he had already been altered was flawed by legislative budget analyst and state economist Amy Baker due to Anway's use of reimbursement rates from the last twenty years instead of the rate that will begin under the Affordable Care Act.
Which might have been viewed as an honest mistake had Scott not also been caught passing off falsehoods about Medicaid expansion before. Politifact noted that Scott had grossly overestimated the cost of the program to the state in July of 2012 as well.
Florida is best known to the other forty-nine states for two things: Retirement communities, and screwing up the 2000 election. Which makes it all the more astounding that he felt it was well within his capacity to tamper with voting rights and Medicaid without anyone being the wiser.
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