Arizona GOP leaders demand for audit of Dominion machines, but House speaker rejects calls to decertify results in separate statement



Republican leaders in the Arizona legislature released statements at cross purposes in the ongoing fight over the certified results of the presidential election in the pivotal swing state.

Former vice president Joe Biden won the state's 11 electoral states in the results that were certified by the state on Monday, but President Donald Trump and his allies have challenged the validity of the official count.

A joint press release from Arizona Senate President Karen Fann and Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers on Friday called for an independent audit of the ballot counting machines in Maricopa County.

"A significant number of voters believe that fraud occurred and with the number of irregularities it is easy to understand why," read the statement from House Majority Leader Warren Petersen. "Especially concerning are the allegations made surrounding the vendor Dominion. It is imperative that the County immediately do a forensic audit on the Dominion software and equipment to make sure the results were accurate."

Trump praised both Fann and Bowers over the statement, and said that he would win the state after the audit.

"Thank you to Senate President Karen Fann and House Speaker Russell Bowers – and all, for what you are doing in Arizona. A fast check of signatures will easily give us the state. Votes against have been reduced to a very small number!" the president tweeted.

But in another statement released on Friday, Bowers made it clear that he would not support any decertification of the election results, and said that he was being asked to disobey his oath of office.

"Even if such evidence existed, the Arizona Legislature simply couldn't do what is being asked. Under our state's constitution, the Legislature can act only when it is in session, and the Legislature could call itself into a special session only with the support of a bipartisan supermajority of its members," wrote Bowers in the statement.

He went on to explain that because of laws passed after the 2016 election, the legislature did not have the power to appoint different electors. They could change the law but could not do so for an election already passed.

"I voted for President Trump and worked hard to reelect him. But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to reverse the results of an election," he added.

Bowers ended his statement with a quote from Ronald Reagan.

"Forty years ago next month, President Ronald Reagan reminded us that while the 'orderly transfer of authority' is a 'commonplace occurrence' for Americans, '[i]n the eyes of many in the world, this every-4-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.' Now Americans are reminded once again never to take for granted what President Reagan correctly described as 'the continuity which is the bulwark of our Republic,'" he concluded.

Here's more about the battle over the results in Arizona:

Challenging the 2020 Election vote in Arizonawww.youtube.com

Dominion voting machine server crash causes delay in Georgia recount



The third count of presidential votes in Georgia hit a snag Sunday when a server maintained by Dominion voting machines — which have become a point of controversy — crashed in Fulton County after about 88% of the votes had been recounted. Officials in Georgia say that the count will resume on Monday morning and expect the recount to be completed by the deadline of Dec. 2.

Everything that happens with Dominion voting machines has become the subject of intense scrutiny after glitches in Michigan appeared to reverse the totals in initial reporting between President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. Many conservatives on social media — including the president and his legal team — have cast doubt on the security of the machines.

According to Fox News, election officials notified the outlet of the unspecified problem with a newly deployed mobile server on Sunday night and indicated that technicians had been dispatched to resolve the issue.

The current tally in Georgia shows President Trump trailing Biden by about 13,000 votes, but the Trump legal team has challenged the results and has sharply criticized Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for failing to do enough to challenge the results of the election, which Raffensperger in particular has strongly stood behind. The Trump campaign has additionally requested (and obtained) multiple recounts of the results in Georgia. The campaign claims that the previous recount's failure to include signature matching (which the state says is now impossible since envelopes have been discarded per usual procedure when ballots are opened) renders the results of these recounts suspect.

Dominion has aggressively denied that its machines either were or have been tampered with in Georgia or any other state. The company has also encouraged workers to work from home and to hide their social media profiles because they claim that their workers have been subjected to "persistent harassment and threats against personal safety" due to the scrutiny of the election results.

Last week, a spokesman for Dominion stated that it was "physically impossible" to alter votes in the Dominion system and noted that whenever someone casts a vote on a Dominion machine, it produces a paper receipt that is kept by the county. "If any electronic interference had taken place, the tally reported electronically would not match the printed ballots, and in every case where we've looked at — in Georgia, all across the country — the printed ballot, the gold standard in election security, has matched the electronic tally," the spokesman said.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Sidney Powell: Evidence of voter fraud could be released online 'by this weekend'



Attorney Sidney Powell announced Friday that the Donald Trump campaign legal team will possibly begin making public evidence from affidavits supporting their claims of a "national conspiracy" of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election as soon as this weekend.

Speaking to BlazeTV host Glenn Beck on the radio, Powell told Beck documents backing up allegations she made against voting system companies Smartmatic and Dominion in a press conference Thursday will be published online soon.

"We will start putting documents online and sending them to people like you, as soon as we possibly can," Powell said. "I would hope that we could start that by this weekend."

She described the volume of evidence her team has received as a "tsunami," though so far Trump's lawyers have held back most of what they claim to have.

"We've unearthed a global, criminal conspiracy that is just mind-blowing. And we've only scratched a tip of the iceberg," Powell asserted.

On Thursday, Powell and the other members of President Donald Trump's legal team alleged that communist Venezuela and George Soros interfered in the U.S. election through weaknesses in Dominion Voting Systems software. Trump's lawyers claim to be in possession of an affidavit from "one very strong witness" who will testify that technological insecurities in Dominion's voting machines made it possible for votes cast for Trump to be switched to former vice president Joe Biden.

This witness, Powell told Beck, "was sitting at [Venezuelan communist dictator] Hugo Chavez's right hand" and personally saw how Dominion's voting machines were manipulated to change the results of elections in the communist nation.

Dominion Voting Systems has categorically denied "false assertions about vote switching and software issues with our voting systems."

"Dominion has no company ownership relationships with the Pelosi family, Feinstein family, Clinton Global Initiative, Smartmatic, Scytl, or any ties to Venezuela," the company said in a statement on its website. "Dominion works with all U.S. political parties; our customer base and our government outreach practices reflect this nonpartisan approach."

The campaign legal team, led by Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, also said Thursday they have enough evidence to disqualify more than double the number of votes needed to overturn the election.

Powell told Beck Trump's lawyers have spoken to "probably over 500 or maybe even 1,000 witnesses by now."

"I don't even know what our affidavit count is," she added. "Rudy has one set. And I have another. And then we share them with each other. So we haven't even had time to read all the affidavits that our lawyers have collected."

When Beck asked Powell where the Trump campaign will file its lawsuits and when they will be heard in court, Powell could not give a specific answer.

"We're going to have to file several lawsuits," Powell said. "It's going to be in all the swing states. We're still gathering massive amounts of evidence, to the point we haven't even had time to process all of it."

"It's just a matter of tying it together in a way that's digestible. And we're in the process of doing that as we speak. And I'm hoping we get something filed by next week that starts outlining and proving the overall fraud."

Lawyer Sidney Powell says Trump team has “massive" evidence, lawsuits coming SOON www.youtube.com

Gwinnett County, Georgia, officials explain what happened regarding the 'software glitch' that delayed counting of thousands of absentee ballots



An election night nightmare scenario is finally over in Gwinnett County, Georgia, a suburban part of Atlanta where several tech problems last week caused a delay in ballot-counting in the middle of a contentious election. Nearly a week after the election, all of the votes, 416,458 to be precise, have been counted and the county results of the election have been certified.

Biden holds a mere 12,000-vote lead over Trump in Georgia, so when reports emerged that a "software glitch" in Gwinnett County prevented up to "80,000 absentee ballots" from being counted on the night of the election, voters nationwide were understandably concerned about the integrity of the process.

TheBlaze reached out to Gwinnett County for clarification on what happened, and county communications director Joe Sorenson explained the initial problems last Tuesday were caused by the machines that scan absentee ballots.

Georgia elections law allows county officials to begin scanning absentee and mail-in ballots on Oct. 19, but the county is not allowed to tabulate the results until Election Day. Going into election night, the county had prepared 118,000 received mail-in ballots for processing. Officials said Gwinnett County is unique in Georgia because each ballot is printed on two pages, front and back, one in English and another in Spanish. The ballots are processed in batches. Each batch can contain up to 50 pages, or 25 ballots.

"Absentee ballots are filled out by hand, and if a ballot is marked clearly, it will run through the scanner without a problem," Sorenson also told WXIA-TV in Atlanta. "If there's a problem with how the ballot was filled out — for example, a voter placed a check mark instead of filling in the circle, didn't completely fill in the circle, or voted for more candidates than allowed in a race — the scanning software will send the ballot to the adjudication module."

According to Sorenson, when a ballot is adjudicated because the scanning software could not read it, a three-person panel consisting of one Democrat, one Republican, and an election official will review the ballot to determine the intent of the voter. Say a voter was supposed to fill in a circle but instead marked an "X" for Donald Trump. The panel would look at the ballot and determine the voter meant to vote for Trump. The flagged ballot would be marked as adjudicated and the vote would be pushed forward to be counted.

Sorenson told TheBlaze that leading up to the election, Gwinnett County officials prepared 5,900 batches of ballots to be scanned and counted. About half of these batches, 2,700, were scanned, adjudicated, counted, and pushed forward Tuesday night. However, the software rejected 3,200 batches of ballots, showing that they still needed to go through the adjudication process even though they already had done so.

Because the ballots are scanned in batches, even if only one ballot needed to be reviewed, the entire batch could not be processed. So anywhere from 3,200 individual ballots to approximately 80,000 (every ballot in all 3,200 batches) needed to be reviewed and re-adjudicated before they could be counted.

When election officials realized this, they immediately contacted the Georgia secretary of state's office to inform them of the problem. They also contacted Dominion, the software company that makes the voting machines used by the county, for technical support. Given the unknown number of ballots affected, the Board of Voter Registrations and Elections decided to push the batches through Tuesday night knowing that many ballots would have to be re-adjudicated and the unofficial election results would likely change before they were made available to the public.

Sorenson directed TheBlaze to the Gwinnett County website, where officials published updates on the vote counting process beginning on Election Day and continuing until the process was complete to maintain transparency with voters.

On the day after the election, the county began to re-adjudicate the 3,200 batches of absentee ballots and announced the results would not be tallied and published until this process was complete. Recall that the adjudication process requires one Democrat, one Republican, and one election official to review the problem ballots. There is no evidence or indication that absentee votes received by Gwinnett County were illegally changed between Election Day and when the results were finally certified.

On the morning of Friday, Nov. 5, the re-adjudication process was completed. The only outstanding votes to count were absentee by mail ballots awaiting issues with their signatures to be resolved by a Nov. 6 deadline, provisional ballots, and overseas and military ballots. These remaining ballot issues are typical of every election year.

It is important to understand that the "results" reported by the media on election night everywhere in the country are not the final results certified by local governments to state governments across the nation. Official, certified election results are usually not available until a few days after the election. Georgia state law requires the secretary of state to certify the results of any election no later than 5:00 p.m. on the 17th day following said election. In other words, there is an expectation built into state law that it may take a little more than two weeks to have official election results finalized.

Gwinnett County certified the results of the election on Monday, Nov. 9, after all of the votes were counted. Joe Biden carried Gwinnett County with 58.39% of the vote, earning 241,827 votes. Donald Trump earned 166,413 votes, 40.18%. Turnout in this suburb was very high with 416,458 voters of 581,467 registered voters (71.62%) casting their ballots.

Georgia officials say abnormal company update caused a glitch that halted machine voting for hours in two counties



Officials admitted that voting was halted in two counties in Georgia over a glitch that was caused by an update to their system that was made the night before the election.

It is important to note that there is not yet any allegation that votes were lost or tampered with in either county, or that voters in either county were unable to vote.

The temporary countywide outage caused voting machines to be inoperable for several hours in Spalding County, but officials were able to get the machines running by 10 a.m. During the time that they were trying to fix the problem, officials had voters use paper ballots instead.

A similar issue in Morgan County forced officials to use paper ballots there as well, which delayed some voters.

"The lines are a bit longer than we would like," said Elections Director Jennifer Doran according to WAGA-TV. "We are asking voters to be patient while we work to get everyone voted."

Officials later said that the glitch was due to an update made to the machine systems that was made on Monday evening.

Spalding County Board of Election elections supervisor Marcia Ridley admitted that the update was abnormal.

"That is something that they don't ever do. I've never seen them update anything the day before the election," Ridley said to Politico.

Both of the counties used voting machines purchased from Dominion Voting Systems Corporation. The 2020 election was the first statewide contest using the new system purchased by Georgia for $100 million in 2019.

In order to give voters enough time to cast their ballot after the delays caused by the glitch, the voting deadline was extended to 11 p.m. by Superior Court Judge W. Fletcher Sams.

Georgia's Secretary of State said that the average wait time for most voters was about 3 minutes on election day, with some waiting for an hour only because of elderly voters needing assistance.

TheBlaze reached out to election officials in both counties but neither responded in time for publication.

The voting results for both counties appear to be similar to results from the 2016 election. Morgan County went for Trump by a margin of 70-30 in the 2016. In 2020, he actually performed better in Morgan County, winning 71 percent of the vote to Biden's 27 percent. Spalding County went for Trump by a margin of 60-35 in 2016, and went for Trump by a margin of 60-38 in 2020.

The U.S. Senate race in Georgia was still undecided on Friday and headed towards a runoff election. The outcome of that election could decide whether the Senate stays in Republican control or switches to the Democrats.

Here's some of the problems in Georgia on election day:

Some central Georgia voters report issues at the polls on Election Daywww.youtube.com