Associated Press
In mid-May, partisan investigators hired by Arizona state lawmakers backed off their allegation that the state’s most populous county had destroyed its 2020 election database. Confronted with proof that the data still existed, they admitted everything was there.
Two months later, the tale lives on. At an event Saturday, former President Donald Trump presented the debunked allegation as a key piece of evidence that the state’s electoral votes were stolen from him in 2020.
It was one of a number of fabricated and familiar stories Trump told the crowd in his relentless effort to deny the well-established legitimacy of his defeat at the hands of President Joe Biden.
Over nearly two hours, Trump revisited his touchstones of grievance, leveling allegations of fraud that election officials and judges have systematically refuted or brushed aside. It was Trump’s most explicit effort to insert himself into the widely discredited Arizona audit as he tries to increase the pressure on other states to embark on similar efforts.
He spoke of untold thousands of dead people voting — no such phenomenon surfaced in postelection audits. He alleged 168,000 Arizona ballots were fraudulent — there is no support for that.
A look at his remarks in Phoenix:
TRUMP: “Unbelievably, the auditors have testified that the master database for the election management system, I’m sorry to tell you, has been deleted…. Meaning the main database for all of the election-related data in Maricopa for 2020 has been illegally erased. It’s been erased.”
THE FACTS: Wholly false. The database was never deleted.
At first, auditors hired by Republican state senators sympathetic to Trump reported that a database directory was deleted from an election management server. The official Twitter account tied to the audit said the deletion amounted to “spoliation of evidence.”
The Republican-dominated Maricopa County Board of Supervisors responded by calling the auditors incompetent and threatening to file a defamation lawsuit. Board Chairman Jack Sellers said the auditors “can’t find the files because they don’t know what they’re doing.” Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican who took over the elections office after defeating a Democrat, called the allegation “unhinged.”
The next day, Ben Cotton, founder of a digital forensics firm working on the audit, confirmed he had recovered all of the files. “I have the information I need,” he acknowledged, and the auditors deleted their tweet.
TRUMP: “There were 18,000 people who voted in Arizona in 2020 who were then purged from the rolls immediately after the election.”
THE FACTS: This didn’t happen. His insinuation that people were stricken from the rolls because they voted for him is baseless.
Actually, 13,320 voters were removed from the rolls in the two months after the election, not 18,000 right away, and there were routine reasons why.
Voting rolls are updated constantly as people move, die, get convicted of felonies or have their voting rights revoked because of incapacitation. Trump was repeating a claim made by Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the inexperienced firm leading the state Senate Republicans’ audit of the 2020 election.
Maricopa County officials said their analysis of the data shows 7,916 voters were removed from the rolls because they moved out of the county or died between Nov. 3, which was Election Day, and Jan. 2. An additional 5,404 people were removed for other reasons, including felony convictions, incapacitation or the voters’ own request to cancel their registration.
The county has about 2.6 million registered voters.
Overall, Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes out of 3.4 million cast. That’s vastly more than the number of votes where fraud is truly suspected.
County election officials only identified 182 cases where voting problems were clear enough that they referred them to investigators for further review, according to an Associated Press investigation. So far, only four cases have led to charges. No one has been convicted. No person’s vote was found to have been counted twice.
10 comments
zhombre
July 25, 2021 at 9:08 am
Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation too.
Michael Hoffmann
July 25, 2021 at 12:01 pm
No chain of custody in this case though it is a bad look for the President to have a son benefiting from the family connections to make a living. (This would never happen in Florida or among crony capitalists like Trump, his family, and his buddy Barrack.)
Anthony D
July 25, 2021 at 1:40 pm
BS!
zhombre
July 25, 2021 at 1:50 pm
You bet it is. Biden’s corrupt and a corrupt media buried stories about that laptop and Biden family dealings.
NoneOfYourBusiness
July 25, 2021 at 12:09 pm
What a pathetic and bias article. I won’t even bother reading this entire rag, but right from the start, you begin misleading readers. You claim that republicans claimed election data was destroyed and then changed their story. FALSE. The truth is election data on a hard drive was indeed deleted, but it was recovered (or in other words it was un-deleted). The fact still remains that data was deleted – unlawfully.
Everyone knows the “official” vote counts. The problem is that dead people votes, ineligible people voted, thousands of votes were counted twice, votes were counted that has mis-matched signatures and no signatures. The list of problems goes on and on and on.
Quit with the lies. People see right through your nonsense.
Ignored by Media
July 25, 2021 at 1:02 pm
At least 22 sex offenders/predators illegally registered to vote after Amendment 4 in Alachua County alone. 9 of them cast illegal ballots in the 2020 general.
Ocean Joe
July 25, 2021 at 3:15 pm
The former president is like a burning crumb of bread stuck in the toaster. It’s over. But don’t stick a fork in it.
zhombre
July 25, 2021 at 5:08 pm
Your ocean remains a shallow pond. Muscovy ducks splash there.
Edward Lyle
July 25, 2021 at 3:49 pm
Just stop the narrative nonsense already… Everyone knows several of the 2020 elections were fraudulent and stolen. Heck, even most DemoKKKrats I speak with admit it. There’s no purpose to blathering on with the conspiracy narrative because no one is going to do anything about it anyway.
I told folks a while back… the goal is to have us back on unconstitutional civil and economically-destructive lockdowns, and in full-blown face diaper mania by the time this election cycle gets into full swing. Why do you think the treasonous DemoKKKrats are going ballistic over attempts to improve our election integrity. We stood by (including Establishment Republicans) and allowed them to steal a Presidential election and at least two Senate seats using well-planned and well-organized systemic fraudulent mail-in ballot operation. A seditious – and truly insurrectionist – operation that targeted specific counties in specific states…. something I also exposed and explained well before the 2020 election.
And don’t kid yourselves either, both the R & D DC Establishment wanted President Trump out. He exposed their impotence and stifled their mutually-corrupt and longstanding tax dollar fleecing operation and syndicate. It was never about Trump “The Man”… it was always about Trump “The Outsider”.
Allow me to venture another projection if I may… I expect they’ll announce that you wont be able to enter a polling place in 2022, unless you can prove you’ve had at least a double shot of the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex cocktail of sugar water and fertilizer runoff.
Our Founders knew we’d be here… and here we are.
zhombre
July 25, 2021 at 5:07 pm
I felt for a while that they would be compelled to admit cheating, even proud of it. The goal was to remove Trump from office. By any means necessary. This his opponents accomplished. Why would you assume they would NOT stuff the ballot box? Ends justify the means and politics ain’t wiffle ball, is it? After Democrats screamed about 2016 being a stolen election, Russian collusion and all that, and Stacy Abrams screamed about the gubernatiorial race in Georgia was stolen from her, can any honest, sentient observer belief that suddenly 2020 represented the Will of the People and no funny business occurred? If you do, let me introduce you to this Nigerian businessman who has a proposition …
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