Tue 01 December 2020:
Joe Biden’s victories in the US presidential election battlegrounds of Arizona and Wisconsin were officially recognised on Monday, handing Donald Trump six defeats out of six in his bid to stop states certifying their results.
Doug Ducey, the state’s Republican governor of Arizona signed off on the results alongside Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, and state Attorney General Mark Brnovich during a short signing ceremony.
“This is America, and no voter should be disenfranchised,” Ducey said during the brief event. “Voting is one of the most important rights and responsibilities in our democracy, and I want to thank Arizonans for making their voices heard and voting in record numbers.”
The certification of Biden’s victory is another blow to Trump, who won Arizona in 2016, as he seeks to undo the results of the US’s Nov. 3 election.
Arizona is now the fourth battleground state to certify Biden’s local victory amid Trump’s claims, after Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania previously did so.
This year, Biden won Arizona by nearly 10,500 votes, according to a tally from The Associated Press.
Democrat Senator-elect Mark Kelly’s victory was also certified by state officials. He will now take the seat formerly held by late Senator John McCain.
As the results were officially certified, Trump took to Twitter to claim “total election corruption” in the southwestern state.
The president and his legal team have continued to claim what they say is rampant electoral fraud, but have failed to produce any evidence to bolster the assertion in court where they have faced repeated legal defeats.
Biden is only the second Democrat in 70 years to win Arizona. In the final tally, he beat Trump by 10,457 votes, or 0.3% of the nearly 3.4m ballots cast.
Even as Hobbs, Ducey, the state attorney general and chief justice of the state supreme court certified the election results, Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis met in a Phoenix hotel ballroom a few miles away to lay out claims of irregularities in the vote count in Arizona and elsewhere. But they did not provide evidence of widespread fraud.
Trump phoned into the meeting and described the election the “greatest scam ever perpetrated against our country”. When he mentioned Ducey’s name, the crowd booed. He accused the governor of “rushing to sign” papers certifying Democratic wins, adding: “Arizona won’t forget what Ducey just did.”
Trump also berated Ducey on Twitter, asking: “Why is he rushing to put a Democrat in office, especially when so many horrible things concerning voter fraud are being revealed at the hearing going on right now.”
Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told CBS’s 60 Minutes programme on Sunday: “There is no foreign power that is flipping votes. There’s no domestic actor flipping votes. I did it right. We did it right. This was a secure election.”
