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- An Arizona GOP election official tore up the state’s election audit on Fox News on Monday.
- The state ordered an audit of the presidential election amid allegations of rigged ballots.
- Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer said the claims made by Trump and others were false.
An Arizona GOP official looked into the Maricopa County election audit on Monday, saying the allegations of voter fraud that prompted the recount were baseless and compared the situation to a “borderline dystopia.”
Arizona began in April verifying the presidential election results for Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, which President Joe Biden won by more than 45,000 votes.
Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer told Fox News on Monday that allegations of persistent electoral fraud in the county by Trump and his associates were “false.”
Even though he would have liked them to win, they didn’t, he said.
“I’m as Republican as they come,” he told Fox’s Bret Baier. “There are a lot of things I would be willing to do for a Republican presidential candidate, but lying about the election is not one of them.”
Donald Trump reiterated his allegations of voter fraud in Arizona at a rally this weekend, claiming among other things that hundreds of thousands of ballots were printed on illegal paper.
Richer said of the former president’s claims: “It’s disappointing. It’s bordering on dystopia. And unfortunately when the president says something like that, it’s very difficult to put the genius back in. the bottle.”
The Republicans’ effort to verify the results has been heavily criticized. State Democrats called it in April an attempt to legitimize allegations of voter fraud.
Election officials have uncovered 182 potential electoral fraud cases out of a possible 3 million, the Associated Press reported last week.
The auditing company Cyber Ninjas has never performed an audit before, and its founder, Doug Logan, has been promoting pro-Trump conspiracy theories on social media.
Richer told Fox that a specific claim repeated by Liz Harrington, a former spokesperson for Trump, earlier on the show was false. Harrington said Arizona’s ballots were illegally cast after the deadline.
Richer said, “So that’s incorrect.” He continued, “As long as they filled it out by October 15, then it’s still a valid voter and that vote should count.”
He said two other claims repeated by Harrington were false: “Some of those claims that we thought were like the living dead came back, I guess.”
“There is nothing to hide. It was not a stolen election,” Richer said.
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