NO evidence of voter fraud: Official audit in more than half of Arizona counties delivers blow to Donald Trump
President Donald Trump and his staunch loyalists have been screaming that the 2020 presidential election has been rigged and the victory claimed by the Joe Biden camp is not fair. But they are yet to produce hard evidence to back their claims. According to an official audit of more than half of the counties of Arizona that Biden has flipped this time, no proof of widespread voter fraud has been found, giving the Trump campaign’s legal initiatives to challenge the results another blow, Daily Mail reported.
The Washington Post on Thursday, November 12, cited Edison Research which projected Biden’s win in the Grand Canyon State -- more than a week after Election Day as counting of the ballots continued. The Democrat leads in the state’s count by about 11,000 votes. The state has 11 electoral votes and clinching them makes Biden the first candidate from the blue party to win the state in a presidential election after 24 years.
On Thursday, Biden met his advisers in Wilmington, Delaware, to talk over the transition process which the outgoing Trump administration has refused to kick off yet. More members of the Republican Party, however, believe that the former vice president should get access to the classified briefings before officially taking over on January 20.
Coming back to the state of affairs in Arizona -- eight of the state’s 15 counties, including the most populated Maricopa where capital Phoenix is located -- gave the in-hand count results and no discrepancies were found. On Thursday, a judge in Maricopa prevented ‘evidence’ from being produced by a Trump campaign aide. The evidence included affidavits filled out using online forms and included lies and spam, Law & Crime reported. Even a Trump campaign conceded in court that he tried to include several shady form-filed affidavits as evidence despite their own probe finding that a subset of the statements they received were filled with lies and “spam”.
Trump campaign faced judge's wrath in Pennsylvania
The event unfolded just a couple of days after a similar scenario was seen in Pennsylvania, another crucial state that Trump needed to win to stay in the hunt for a second term. On Tuesday, November 10, one of Trump campaign attorneys Jonathan Goldstein refused to allege electoral fraud when asked up front by a judge.
In Arizona, Judge Daniel Kiley expressed his concern to ask: “How is this a reliable process of gathering evidence?”
Trump campaign lawyer Kory Langhofer tried to argue that online forms used CAPTCHA technology where the users have to identify letters, numbers or photos to prove that they are not bots. He said the president’s campaign lawyers also visited witnesses’s houses and omitted submissions that included lies.
If the Trump campaign could not produce evidence that an individual was lying, they adopted the strategy of producing a pile of evidence but that did not convince the judge, according to Law & Crime.
“That just shows you cannot disprove what’s asserted,” he said.
An under-pressure Langhofer eventually said: “This is not a fraud case.” He then made the casting an allegation of defects within the voting system instead of a lawsuit. “It is not a stealing-the-election case.”
On Wednesday, November 11, Arizona’s Attorney-General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, also dashed Trump’s allegations of voter fraud when he told Fox Business Network’s Neil Cavuto that there is no evidence and facts that will make anyone believe that the results of this year’s election will change.
“It does appear that Joe Biden will win Arizona,” he said.