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Arizona Lawmakers Call For Resolution to Hold Back Electoral College Votes
Reporter : Xiao Bowen / Publisher : The Epoch Times
At a public hearing in Arizona with select members of the state legislature and members of President Donald Trump’s legal team, lawmakers called for their colleagues to support an upcoming resolution that would delay the release of the state’s Electoral College votes.
Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem told reporters during the Nov. 30 hearing that they hope to have a resolution “within the next 24 to 48 hours.” The state holds 11 Electoral College votes.
“We are clawing our Electoral College votes back, we will not release them,” Finchem said. “That’s what I’m calling on our colleagues in both the House and Senate to do—exercise our plenary authority under the U.S. Constitution.
“There is a legal brief out there that says we are not tethered to state statute when it comes to this one question.”
According to Finchem, the move would be easy to make and would be legally binding.
“A simple majority can call the House and Senate back, and in a day can pass a resolution and cause those electoral votes to basically be held,” he said. “And it is binding—I’ll see y’all in court.”
In total, nine Republican state lawmakers attended the meeting, which was held at a hotel in downtown Phoenix. They had requested permission to hold a formal legislative hearing at the state Capitol but were denied by the Republican House speaker and Senate president, according to The Associated Press.
Trump’s attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, alongside witnesses, appeared in front of members of the Arizona Legislature alleging that considerable voter fraud occurred in the state. They also pushed for the Republican-majority state House and Senate to hold a vote on the certification of the election.
During the hearing, a cybersecurity expert said the user manual for Dominion Voting Systems machines guides users on how to connect to the internet, and that the machines, used by multiple states, were connected to the internet during the election.
“The Dominion suite user manual is about an inch and a half thick. My team went back through the user manual and looked at all the instances where in the user’s manual, it tells operators to connect the ethernet cords to the router, and it is, the systems are connected to the internet,” said Phil Waldron, a cybersecurity expert and retired Army colonel.
“Our teams looked at spirographs on the Dominion network on Election Day and showed the increased web traffic, internet traffic on Election Day for Dominion servers.
“In a nutshell, these systems are not what you’ve been told, if you’ve been told anything.
“They are connected to the internet. There is no transparency of how the voter information is processed, moved, and stored. And, as a matter of fact, these companies have refused to allow any type of inspection into their code and they always decry, it’s our IP, it’s IP protection.”
In 2016, Trump won the state’s 11 electoral votes by less than 100,000 votes. In the 17 presidential elections between 1952 and 2016, only one Democratic candidate won Arizona—Bill Clinton in 1996.
Arizona’s secretary of state on Nov. 30 certified the state’s presidential election results. Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, said in a press conference that despite the pandemic and other complexities, “we had an extremely well-run election and saw historically high voter participation.”
During the hearing, a volunteer poll observer and worker in Arizona’s Pima County told Republican Arizona state legislators that she had been told by state election officials to allow people to vote who may not have been properly registered to vote in Arizona on Election Day.
“I was having to allow people to vote who literally had just moved here. A large percentage had addresses from two apartment complexes,” poll observer Anna Orth said.
Orth said “many” of these individuals were “residents for not more than a month,” adding that from her observations, she estimated that about 2,000 people appeared to be out-of-state voters.
According to Pima County’s elections website, people can vote if they have lived within Pima County “at least 29 days prior to the general election.”
These people, she said, had out-of-state driver’s licenses but attempted to show proof they could vote by presenting a utility bill that suggested they lived in the precinct.
Orth then alleged she had spoken to a poll observer who said he was from Los Angeles and told her “he was there to turn Arizona blue,” meaning Democratic.
She said the man told her: “We’re here specifically to turn this precinct blue. This is one of our problem ones. I came from another precinct in Maricopa [County].” There was a group of them there, she added.
The man’s job, Orth said, was to make sure that anyone who was turned away from voting could vote. When questioned further, the man allegedly said he is in contact with several lawyers to make sure of that, according to Orth, who said she submitted an affidavit about her claims under penalty of perjury.
Also, on Nov. 24, the head of the Arizona Republican Party filed a petition for early inspection of mail-in-ballot envelopes and signatures. The court petition against the 11 Arizona Democrat presidential electors also seeks inspection of duplicate ballots with their originals in Maricopa County.
The petition was filed by Arizona Republican Party chairwoman Kelli Ward.
“A formal legal elections challenge is expected to be filed soon alleging that the process used to validate ballots returned by mail was legally insufficient,” the Arizona Republican Party said in a statement. “The critical process of verifying a signature determines whether a vote is counted.”
Selecting Electors
At the hearing, Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis pushed for the GOP-majority state House and Senate to hold a vote on the certification of the election.
“Your political career is worth losing to save the right to vote in America,” Giuliani told the Republican senators. “At times in our history, men and women stepped forward to defend Americans’ rights and liberties.”
The U.S. Constitution, Giuliani said, stipulates that state legislatures have the authority to certify a state’s electors.
“You, the legislature of Arizona, have the plenary power to regulate the selection of electors in a presidential election,” he said, adding that the Supreme Court has ruled that state houses and senates can reclaim the power to name electors.
“I don’t see how a decent, honest person could let this happen.”
Ellis said the president’s campaign wasn’t asking the legislature to overturn the results of the election, but to rather, not certify allegedly fraudulent results.
The office of Arizona’s secretary of state didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time. Previously, Hobbs said she had seen no evidence of irregularities or fraud in the election that could overturn the results of the election.
Current data shows Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden leading Trump by about 11,000 votes in the state.
Earlier, Giuliani opened by saying that socialist-leaning politicians and officials have gradually eroded the personal liberties of Americans, noting that the allegedly fraudulent election process on Nov. 3 was an extension of that.
“We have been warned for 20 years that going to major mail-in ballots … will be fraught with tremendous fraud,” he said. “We were warned by former President Jimmy Carter,” former Supreme Court Justice David Souter, and prominent Democrats to “never do it.”
“Democrats used to be against mail-in ballots,” he said, adding that the current crop of politicians has reversed that viewpoint to gain more “money and power.”
In Arizona, much of the state’s alleged fraud had to do with the mail-in ballot system, Giuliani said.
“Once the ballot is separated from the envelope, it’s gone forever,” he said.
In Pima and Maricopa counties, there are hundreds of thousands of votes that should be “declared null and void,” the former mayor alleged. There was “clear fraud” in which poll workers were observed changing votes in Arizona, he said, remarking that ballot box stuffing also occurred.
Jack Phillips, Zachary Stieber, and Simon Veazey contributed to this report.
Maricopa County GOP chairwoman Linda Brickman on Nov. 30 testified before members of the Arizona State Legislature that she personally observed votes for President Donald Trump being tallied as votes for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden when input into Dominion machines.
Brickman, the GOP head of one of the country’s largest counties and a veteran county elections worker, submitted her testimony in a sworn affidavit under penalty of perjury. She testified that she and her Democratic partner witnessed “more than once” Trump votes default and shift to Biden when they were entering votes into Dominion machines from ballots that couldn’t be read by machines.
She alleged that she was later threatened by election supervisors at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center (MCTEC) for speaking out about what she had witnessed.
“I observed, with my Democratic partner, the preparation of a new ballot, since the original one was soiled, or wouldn’t go through the tabulators. I read her a Trump Republican ballot, and as soon as she entered it into the system, the ballot defaulted on the screen to a Biden Democratic ballot,” Brickman told GOP Arizona State legislators on Monday.
She remarked that when she reported the issue to election supervisors, others in the room also commented that they had “witnessed the same manipulation.”
“We were never told what, if any corrective action was taken,” Brickman continued. “All I know is the next day, I was called outside the room that I was working in for signature verification by a supervisor who said, ‘I understand you caused some problems this week and you thought our machines were not working correctly.’
“I was told at that point in time that I could not discuss anything or talk about what was going on.
“Many people were threatened,” Brickman told the hearing. “They were told that their voices would be suppressed, they would have to leave the room and not work there again. I’m here because I think this is our duty to speak the truth.”
She told the hearing that she was yelled at and “reprimanded” by her own supervisor, who accused her of causing trouble and “bringing things up that I shouldn’t have.”
She also said that before the election, during testing and certification of the Dominion voting machines on Nov. 18, she had refused to approve the certification of the Dominion system during a meeting with Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) because the machines had malfunctioned during the test, and were shut down and reset by Dominion staff instead of corrected.
She said that no explanation was given about the errors. “We could see the machines but we could not see or observe the software behind the machine to confirm what had really gone on,” she added.
Trump’s legal team had previously pointed to witness testimony alleging that election results from Dominion Voting Systems are susceptible to manipulation—an allegation that the company has repeatedly denied.
Writing for the Wall Street Journal in a piece published this week, Dominion CEO John Poulos said recent claims against the company “fueled the harassment of election officials and Dominion employees across the country,” including death threats.
“The lies and smears have no basis in fact but they do real damage to our democracy by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the electoral process. The false allegations should be retracted immediately,” he said.
Dominion has not responded yet to a request from The Epoch Times for comment.
Brickman in the hearing also testified to a number of other voting irregularities that she directly observed, including the constant lowering of signature verification standards by her election supervisors in order to “move more quickly” and process the higher amount of early and mail-in ballots received for the November election.
“Standards were lowered from approximately 15 points of similarities … reduced to a minimum of three, and then lowered to one, and ultimately none,” Brickman said, recalling that she was told to “just pass each signature verification through.”
“We were told, ‘Too many rejections have already been turned in … we need to move more quickly.’ This is not the way an election should be run. Where’s the integrity?” Brickman challenged.
The GOP chairwoman also said she observed signatures on envelopes that were completely different from the name of the listed voter being let through by election supervisors.
“So the ones who signed the envelopes were not the actual voters, but these were allowed to go through with ‘Maricopa County verified’ stamped on the outside of each affidavit envelope,” she said.
Batches of envelopes bearing the same handwriting for different signatures were also observed, she said.
“There were at least 30 ballots that I saw at one time, that were signed by the same handwriting but on different voters’ names,” Brickman testified. “When I asked if the county attorney would be alerted for possible fraud, I was told ‘no,’ that supervisors would take care of it.”
One of the most “egregious” irregularities, Brickman said, was the turning away of Trump votes as duplicated votes or “overvotes” because the voter filled checked both the bubble for Trump on the ballot but also wrote in the president’s name under the write-in candidate.
“This would continue on as an overvote, which means no vote was counted at all despite the policy having been changed to allow these overvotes. Supervisors contradicted their own policies where the [voter’s] intent was clear,” she said.
“I am here today again not as an expert in the Dominion software but as a voter in Maricopa County who wants to hear and speak the truth even though myself and others have been suppressed to speak before you now,” Brickman told the hearing.
“There should be integrity,” she said.
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