The Arizona Republican Party filed a lawsuit seeking to expand the scope of the election audit in the state — and an Arizona court has now rejected their request. The Arizona GOP had contended that state legislation required county-level authorities to conduct a hand count audit of a certain number of “precincts,” and they wanted the court to compel Maricopa County authorities to conduct this audit accordingly — rather than of a certain number of “vote centers,” which stood in place of the traditional precinct-specific polling places in the recently concluded election.
With 748 precincts in Maricopa County but only about 175 “vote centers” in use during the recent election, the required audit double-checking tallies at 2 percent (or more) of polling places would have covered 15 precincts but only 3-4 vote centers, depending on which breakdown of the county was used. Vote centers, of course, cover larger geographical areas than precinct-level polling places, so the Arizona Republican Party’s apparent implication that double-checking at least 3-4 vote centers would have provided a less complete picture of the county’s results than double-checking at least 15 precincts simply doesn’t seem accurate. According to voting rights lawyer Marc Elias, the Arizona court defeat marked the then-30th defeat for Trump and his allies in post-Election Day court cases.
🚨BREAKING: Arizona court DISMISSES lawsuit filed by the Arizona Republican Party seeking to expand the state’s election audit.
Trump and his allies are now 1-30 in post-election litigation.https://t.co/BGgXavGgKq
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) November 19, 2020
Just this Thursday, the Trump campaign dropped their last election-related lawsuit in Michigan, where President-elect Joe Biden won by over 2 percent, and they’ve claimed to have seen their goals get accomplished outside of court — but they’re brazenly incorrect. The case had been trying to block the certification of results in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, but those results are now certified. Two Republican members of the county’s canvassing board have said that they want to rescind their votes in favor of certifying the results — but there’s no legal way for them to actually do so.
Despite these setbacks, the president and his allies don’t exactly sound deterred in their attempts to convince observers that widespread fraud plagued the recent election. At a Thursday press conference, top Trump defender Rudy Giuliani claimed that a centrally-directed, nationwide Democratic conspiracy to commit fraud and swing the election to Biden had unfolded. There’s zero meaningful evidence for this claim. He may as well have claimed to be from Mars.
