Arizona Speaker Declines to Change State’s Electors, Calls for Audit of County Voting Equipment

by Sharon Rondeau

(Dec. 4, 2020) — On Friday the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, Rusty Bowers, declined a request from the Trump campaign’s legal team to appoint electors for President Trump to replace those presumably “elected” by a majority of Arizonans on November 3 for Democratic challenger Joe Biden.

In a press release, Bowers declared the Trump campaign’s request “breathtaking” and not possible for the legislature to effect due to state law which assigns the selection of presidential electors to “the voters” on “Election Day.”

In Arizona, the counting of votes deemed legally-cast on November 3 continued for more than a week before the results in Biden’s favor were declared. Gov. Doug Ducey, who certified the vote results on November 30, “hired a lawyer” on Thursday, Trump tweeted.

Additionally, Bowers wrote, a 2016 law requires the state’s presidential electors to cast their votes at the Electoral College, which meets in mid-December, according to the popular vote.

Bowers said that meetings early in the week between Trump campaign attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis and members of the legislature yielded only “unsupported theories of fraud” rather than “proof” of wrongdoing which, he said, the legislature would in any event be unable to rectify through a change in electors.

Also on Friday, Bowers and State Senate President Karen Fann issued a press release seeking “an independent audit of the Dominion software and equipment used by Maricopa County in the 2020 General Election” which a third legislator said has been agreed to by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.

The press release quotes House Majority Leader Warren Petersen as having commented, “A significant number of voters believe that fraud occurred and with the number of irregularities it is easy to understand why. Especially concerning are the allegations made surrounding the vendor Dominion. It is imperative that the County immediately do a forensic audit on the Dominion software and equipment to make sure the results were accurate.”

Biden was reported to have won Arizona by 10,457 votes, or .3% of the total vote.  Arizona law does not allow for a recount unless the difference between candidates is .1% or closer.

In 2020, Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Michigan were considered “swing” states.  Biden’s reported win over Trump in Georgia was 12,670 votes and in Michigan, 150,000 votes.

Observers in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Pennsylvania have reported that they were barred from observing the vote-counting on Election Day.

The Amistad Project, which reported Tuesday having obtained affidavits from individuals who reported witnessing ballot fraud on a large scale in Michigan and Pennsylvania, filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging Arizona’s election certification, and specifically, approximately 200,000 ballots it claims could have been fraudulent based on data analysis and another possible 100,000 legitimate ballots in Maricopa County which it claims were not counted.

The group has also filed suits in Wisconsin, where Biden reportedly won by 20,695 votes, although the Trump campaign has filed suit, claiming that state law was violated by the widespread use of absentee ballots without observing the required procedures, such as each voter requesting such a ballot.  The suit, filed Tuesday, claimed other irregularities, including “Democracy in the Park” events it claimed the Biden campaign encouraged.

On Thursday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court referred a Trump campaign lawsuit to lower courts, issuing a statement denying that it did deemed the issues raised to be unimportant.

On Election Night, Trump was reportedly winning virtually all of the “swing” states handily, but overnight, while a reported 3-5-hour stoppage in vote-counting took place in those states, Biden gained large “spikes” of votes which showed him ahead by the morning of November 4.

The mainstream media has largely declined to question the unusual patterns which some analysts say was replicated in at least three swing states, all remarkably at the same time.