This was to demonstrate an alleged electoral fraud denounced for months by the Republicans. Four months later, the recount of the Maricopa County, Arizona ballots by a private company close to the party of Donald Trump did not finally succeed in proving the existence of a theft of the ballot by the Democrats, as yelled however ad nauseam the Republican camp since last November.
Worse, this verification of the vote ultimately brought up 99 more votes for Joe Biden – they had not been counted the first time around – and found 261 votes over counted for the former US president, according to the final report which was presented this Friday to state senators and a preliminary version has been obtained speak New York Times.
“It’s completely ridiculous,” commented political commentator Eddie Espinoza, joined by The duty in Tucson, Arizona. The Republicans spent several million dollars in this exercise to get there ”.
Maricopa County, which encompasses the greater Phoenix area, found itself in the spotlight this spring after the Republican Party has decided to launch – at the insistent request of the deposed ex-US president – this verification of the ballot. In November, Joe Biden tipped Arizona, a traditionally Republican state, into Democratic hands with a lead of more than 10,000 votes. The change of course mainly took place in this county, the most populous and urban in Arizona.
In symbiosis with Donald Trump’s speech, the State’s Republican Party then denounced “spurious” elections. The ex-president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, spoke of the “fraudulent” vote of “hundreds of thousands” of illegal immigrants in the ballot, while local Republican elected officials spoke of shredded ballots and the theft of election material on purpose. Among other unfounded accusations.
The verification of the vote was then entrusted to the Florida company Cyber Ninjas, whose leaders have been the promoters since November of Donald Trump’s speech wanting the presidency of the United States to have been stolen from him by the Democrats. And this, in contradiction with the facts.
After analyzing the 2.1 million ballots recorded in the county, the company claims to have identified 2,500 postal ballots whose signature was considered problematic, according to it, or 0.1% of the total vote, and two ballots linked to the same ID. This is a margin of error equivalent to that identified in the 2016 ballot in this county.
“That should end this story”
For Maricopa County Oversight Committee Chairman Jack Seller, the audit results mostly confirm that the ballot counting machines “did what they were made to do and that the results reflect the will. voters ”. “That should end this story.” Everything else is just noise, ”he said in a statement released on Friday.
The reliability of these machines was questioned by Republicans in the aftermath of the election. The audit conducted by Cyber Ninjas, however, forced the county to get rid of all of these calculators, since their certification was compromised by the unsupervised manipulations of the firm close to the Republicans during their political evaluation of the poll. Their replacement is expected to cost Arizona election officials $ 6 million.
“The result of this recount should certainly be a wake-up call to Republicans who believe the election was fraudulent,” said Eddie Espinoza. “But that will not happen, since these steps are not intended to change the result of the vote, but to justify the adoption of laws to limit access to the ballot boxes. [en vue des prochaines élections]. »
Since November, several states, including Arizona, have adopted several of these laws which reduce the electoral rolls or complicate the democratic exercise in strongly democratic regions.
Jack Seller wonders if the Republican camp will end up “accepting the truth now” in a tense climate where state election officials continue to face hate phone calls and emails “fed by concerted campaigns to shake Americans’ faith in the electoral system ”.
Chance of calendars, the disclosure of the results of the verification of the vote in Arizona comes the day after the announcement of the recount of the vote in four counties of Texas where the elected Republicans are busy preparing the electoral ground to their advantage for the year next. Donald Trump won the 2020 elections there with a lead of 630,000 votes.
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