Trump Says Results in Arizona County Should Be Decertified Amid Precinct’s 100.6% Ballot Return Rate
19:03 GMT 16.10.2021 (Updated: 19:14 GMT 16.10.2021)
© REUTERS / Cheney Orr
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The former president has spent nearly a year alleging that the November 2020 election was “stolen” from him thanks to manipulations involving electronic voting machines and mail-in ballots in key swing states including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. State courts have refused to hear his campaign’s claims.
In the wake of the release of a draft audit report of Arizona’s Maricopa County’s 2020 election results finding alleged glaring anomalies and irregularities, former president Donald Trump is now looking to review results in the state’s Pima County as well.
“A new analysis of mail-in ballots in Pima County, Arizona means the election was Rigged and Stolen from the Republican Party in 2020, and in particular, its Presidential Candidate,” Trump said in a statement posted to Twitter by his spokeswoman, Liz Harrington on Friday.
NEW!
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) October 15, 2021
President Donald J. Trump releases new statement on damning findings in Pima County, Arizona
"Either a new Election should immediately take place or the past Election should be decertified and the Republican candidate declared the winner." pic.twitter.com/ACNvcA70bE
The three page statement, accompanied by graphs of Pima’s mail-in ballots and their return rate by precinct, showed what Trump alleged were “staggering anomalies and fictitious votes in Pima County’s mail-in returns, making it clear [election officials] stuffed the ballot box (in some precincts with more ballots than were ever sent!).”
Trump suggested that he had been outperforming Biden by three percentage points before mail-in ballot results began coming in at a “way higher than normal” rate of over 87 percent, reversing the Republican’s lead.
“Two precincts in Pima had over 100 percent turnout for mail-in ballots – which is impossible – and 40 precincts had over 97% returned. The national mail-in ballot return rate was 71%, but in Pima County the mail-in ballot return rate was 15% higher, and 19% higher than all the counties combined in the entire state of Arizona,” Trump alleged, noting that one precinct had a mathematically impossible ballot return rate of 100.6%.
“Turnout rates of 99% and 100% is what you get in a Third World Country, and that’s what we’re becoming (look at crime, the Border, Afghanistan, food prices, energy prices, and the empty store shelves, etc.) unless this is fixed immediately!” Trump bemoaned.
“Either a new Election should immediately take place or the past Election should be decertified and the Republican candidate declared the winner,” the former president demanded.
Something strange happened in Pima County…https://t.co/3GdhH2erXM
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) October 16, 2021
Pima County administrator Chuck Huckelberry dismissed Trump’s claims, telling a local TV channel that the county had “conducted a free, fair, secure and accurate election.”
“The results were publicly audited via hand count by the County’s Republican and Democratic parties, and the results were certified by the Pima County Board of Supervisors and Arizona Governor Doug Ducey,” Huckelberry stressed.
The administrator did not elaborate on the allegations made by Trump, including the unusually and/or mathematically impossibly high mail-in ballot return rates in some precincts.
The former president’s focus on Pima County comes after the release of a GOP-led hand recount of votes in Arizona’s Maricopa County which appeared to show that Joe Biden narrowly won the district, but which also found severe irregularities including missing ballots, votes from persons who “had moved prior to the election,” “intentionally rolled over” logs, and other discrepancies. The report said the issues were serious enough to potentially put results within the margin-of-error.
The results of the Maricopa audit prompted Republican Arizona Senator Wendy Rogers to propose a “50-state audit” and the “decertification” of election results nationwide where appropriate.
Trump has spent nearly a year accusing Democratic officials in key swing states of rigging the 2020 vote using rigged voting machines and fraudulent mail-in ballots, claiming his campaign had “thousands” of witnesses and “hundreds and hundreds” of sworn affidavits on hand to prove fraud. State courts refused to hear the allegations, while the Supreme Court struck down an attempt by the state of Texas to contest results in other states in December 2020. Democratic officials and their allies in the media and online have dismissed Trump's election fraud claims as a dangerous conspiracy theory.
