GOP-led Maricopa County board decries election recount a ‘sham’
The Republican-led Maricopa County Board of Supervisors condemned the state Senate’s GOP-led audit of the county’s 2020 election results as a “sham” in a letter Monday.
In a letter to GOP senators announcing that the board will cease all cooperation with the GOP state senators’ efforts, the board accused state senators of allowing Arizona to become a “laughingstock” as they pursued discredited, false claims of election fraud perpetrated by former President Trump.
“You are photographing ballots contrary to the laws that the Senate helped enact, and you are sending those images to unidentified places and people. You have repeatedly lost control of your Twitter account, which has tweeted things that appear to be the rantings of a petulant child—not the serious statements of a serious audit,” wrote the board.
“I will not be responding to any more requests from this sham process. Finish your audit and be ready to defend what you’re finding in a court of law,” added Chairman Jack Sellers (R) at Monday’s meeting of the board, according to The Washington Post.
The blistering letter issued Monday by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors is just the latest instance of local GOP officials bucking the former president’s disproven claims about the 2020 election, as did Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) last year amid Trump’s efforts to overturn that state’s results.
Many GOP elected officials at the national level, on the other hand, have maintained their belief that irregularities or outright fraud occurred during the 2020 election or have refused to clearly state their position in the months since the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, during which hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the building hoping to stop the certification of the 2020 election results, and after which numerous GOP lawmakers voted to support some of those same objections.
Trump himself has lent support to efforts to overturn his defeat. He recently told a crowd at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida that should Arizona’s audit uncover fraud, other states would do the same.
“Let’s see what they find. I wouldn’t be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes,” Trump said earlier this month.
“After that, we’ll watch Pennsylvania, and you watch Georgia, then you’re going to watch Michigan and Wisconsin, and you’re watching New Hampshire,” he added.
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