Former President Donald Trump issued a statement on October 15 denouncing the results of an investigation of mail-in ballots in Pima County’s 2020 election, calling for either the results for president to be decertified with Trump declared the winner or hold a new election. He said the election was “Rigged and Stolen,” citing “staggering anomalies and fictitious votes” that “stuffed the ballot box” with more ballots than were sent out in some precincts. Arizona Rep. Mark Finchem (R-Oro Valley), who is running for Arizona Secretary of State, echoed Trump’s claims, saying there are “34,000 or 35,000 fictitious voters” in Pima County.
Trump said the analysis was done from publicly available election data, and showed that mail-in ballots returned in Pima County during the election initially showed him up 3 points over other Republicans, with Joe Biden underperforming other Democrats by 3 points. Then the mail-in ballots started returning at an abnormally high rate, over 87%, and Trump suddenly started performing worse and Biden better. However, “they overplayed their hand, and got caught. Two precincts in Pima had over 100 percent turnout for mail-in ballots — which is impossible — and 40 precincts had over 97% returned.”
Trump said the national mail-in ballot return rate was only 71 percent, but in Pima County it was 15 percent higher, as well as 19 percent higher than all the counties in Arizona combined. He cited two precincts with astronomical turnout. One had 99.5 percent mail-in turnout, resulting in 9,812 ballots counted. Another had 100.6 percent mail-in turnout, with 2,182 ballots returned — even though only 2,170 were actually mailed out. “These two total 11,994 ballots, alone more than the margin needed to win.” Trump lost the state by 10,457 votes.
Analyzing the Pima County mail-in ballot rate compiled by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai of EchoMail, who also completed a full report on the Maricopa County mail-in ballot rate, Trump observed that the precincts with the abnormally high return rates, higher than 92 percent, represented 247,000 votes. “If just 2% are fraudulent, meaning Trump votes went to Biden, that would be enough to change the so-called margin in Arizona of 10,457 votes.”
He also cited “tens of thousands of illegal votes” discovered by the Maricopa County ballot audit, “including 6,545 mail-in ballots with no envelopes, 2,580 bad signatures on mail-in ballot envelopes, and 1,919 mail-in ballot envelopes with no signature.”
Noting that the Department of Justice had this information since the election but did nothing about it, Trump urged the Pima County Republican Party to “start a canvass of Republican voters, in order to identify and remove the obvious fictitious voters from the system.”
Arizona Rep. Mark Finchem (R-Oro Valley), who is running for Arizona Secretary of State and who is endorsed by Trump, is calling for an audit of the Pima County 2020 election. He is collecting 500,000 signatures for it on a petition. He tweeted, “After hearing the evidence in the Arizona Audit report I call for decertification of the Arizona election, arrest of those involved in tampering with election systems, and an audit of Pima County as a next step.”
During a speech at the Trump rally in Des Moines, Iowa on Saturday, Finchem said, “That is the second most populous county in the state of Arizona, where we had a whistleblower who sent an email not just to the DOJ but to every single legislator saying, there’s 34,000 or 35,000 fictitious voters, and they’ve been inserted in system, and we’re going to never find them.”
Arizona Rep. Wendy Rogers’ petition to decertify the election in Arizona has reached over a million signatures. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich is investigating the results of the Maricopa County ballot audit, and has ordered Maricopa County to save all 2020 election data in a litigation freeze.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
