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Phoenix (AP) — A party investigator hired by Arizona parliamentarians in mid-May Withdrew their claim The state’s most populous county destroyed the 2020 election database. Faced with evidence that the data still existed, they admitted that everything was there.
Two months later, the story lives on. At an event on Saturday, former President Donald Trump presented an uncovered allegation as important evidence that the state’s electoral college was stolen from him in 2020.
It is one of the many forged and well-known stories Trump told the crowd in his relentless efforts to deny the established legitimacy of his defeat by President Joe Biden. was.
For almost two hours, Trump revisited the touchstone of his complaint and leveled allegations of fraud systematically refuted or removed by election authorities and judges. Inserting himself into the untrustworthy Arizona audit was Trump’s most obvious effort, as he is trying to pressure other states to undertake similar efforts.
He talked about the votes of thousands of dead — no such phenomenon surfaced in post-election audits. He claimed that 168,000 Arizona ballots were fraudulent — It is not supported.
See his remarks in Phoenix:
Trump: “Unbelievably, the auditor testified that the master database of the election management system was deleted. Sorry, it means the main database of all election-related data in Marikopa in 2020. Illegal. It has been erased. It has been erased. “
Fact: Completely wrong. The database was never deleted.
First, an auditor hired by a Republican senator who sympathizes with Trump reported that the database directory had been removed from the election administration server. According to the official Twitter account related to auditing, deletion is equivalent to “politicizing evidence.”
The Republican-controlled Maricopa County Oversight Committee Call the auditor incompetent It threatens to file a defamation proceeding. “We can’t find the file because we don’t know what we’re doing,” said Jack Cellars, chairman of the board. Republican Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer, who took over the election office after defeating the Democratic Party, called the claim “no hinge.”
The next day, Ben Cotton, the founder of a digital forensics company working on an audit, confirmed that he had recovered all the files. “I have the information I need,” he admitted, and the auditor deleted the tweet.
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Trump: “18,000 people who voted in Arizona in 2020 were banished from the roll shortly after the election.”
Fact: This did not happen. His innuendo that people were struck from the roll because they voted for him is unfounded.
In fact, two months after the election, 13,320 voters were dismissed, not immediately 18,000, for routine reasons.
The electoral list is constantly updated when people move, die, are convicted of felony, or have their voting rights revoked due to incompetence. Trump reiterated the allegations made by Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Samurai, an inexperienced company that led the state Senate Republican audit of the 2020 elections.
According to data analysis, Maricopa County officials have removed 7,916 voters from the roll because they either moved out of the county or died between the election dates of November 3 and January 2. rice field. For other reasons, an additional 5,404 people have been removed. Includes, Felony’s conviction, incapacity, or the voter’s own request to cancel the registration.
The county has about 2.6 million registered voters.
Overall, Biden won Arizona with 10,457 votes out of a cast of 3.4 million people. This far exceeds the number of votes that scams are really suspected of.
According to an Associated Press investigation, county election officials identified only 182 cases in which voting issues were well-clear and were referred to investigators for further investigation. So far, only four cases have been prosecuted. No one has been convicted. No votes were found for those who were counted twice.
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Woodward reported from Washington. The Associated Press author David Klepper of Providence, Rhode Island and Jill Colvin of Washington contributed to this report.
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Editor’s Note — See the credibility of politicians’ claims.
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