Flags fly at the Justice for J6 rally at the Arizona Capitol Saturday./Jerod MacDonald-Evoy
By Howard Fischer | Capitol Media Services
Supporters of Donald Trump are peppering Gov. Doug Ducey with demands that he decertify the election even though he says there’s no legal authority for him to do that.
Ducey press aide C.J. Karamargin reported that the governor got about 300 emails each day on Saturday and Sunday calling for him to act.
“It is more than we receive on vaccines, masks, border issues, refugees,” he said. “This tops the level of constituent interest those issues have.”
And those demands come despite the governor’s statements, repeated most recently Friday following the release of findings from the Senate-ordered audit of the 2020 Maricopa County returns, that there is no way to do what they are demanding.
The move comes on the heels of a recount of Maricopa County ballots, which showed that the results were accurate and the Democrat outpolled the incumbent Republican. In fact, the hand count actually increased Biden’s lead by a bit.
But Trump supporters are hanging on other conclusions by Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, that there are discrepancies between other numbers the county reported and what the auditors were able to find. These range from 23,344 mail-in ballots received from someone at a prior address to 9,041 more ballots returned from voters than were received.
And, along with other questions raised, those raising objections point out that there are enough of these questionable votes to more than overcome the 45,109 margin of victory by Biden in the state’s largest county — and, by extension, overturning the 10,457 edge the Democrat had statewide.
Then there are questions of whether election files were deleted.
County officials provided a point-by-point rebuttal of the findings.
But this clearly isn’t over. And the main thrust has been to decertify the election.