Arizona certifies Biden as winner while Giuliani is there spewing lies about 'fraud'

Arizona on Monday certified former Vice President Joe Biden as the winner of the state’s 11 Electoral College votes, ignoring pleas from Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who at the very moment the certification took place was telling lies about voter fraud and encouraging the state to not certify its results.

At the time Arizona certified its results — with Republican Gov. Doug Ducey in attendance — Giuliani was testifying at a so-called “hearing” held by Arizona Republican state lawmakers, who gathered at a hotel in Phoenix to come up with evidence to back up Trump’s voter fraud lies.

Giuliani told the Republican-held Legislature to “take over” the election, alleging without any proof that “a few hundred thousand” of what he claimed were 5 million “illegal aliens and immigrants” voted in Arizona’s election.

Of course, Arizona has a total population of roughly 7.3 million people, according to the Census Bureau. That means, according to Giuliani’s logic, nearly 70% of the state’s residents are undocumented immigrants. But there is no proof that any undocumented immigrants voted — it was just Giuliani’s hunch.

“There is no question any reasonable person’s mind that the vote totals contain large numbers of illegal votes from people who are not citizens of United States,” Giuliani said at the hearing, according to RawStory. “And the officials certifying have made no effort to find out the truth, which, seems to me, gives the state legislature a perfect reason to take over the conduct of this election.”

During the hearing, Giuliani called a witness who claimed to have “personally debriefed the son of a Cuban intelligence officer who had first-hand knowledge” that long-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez was involved in a conspiracy to rig voting machines in the 2020 election. There is no evidence of this, and the conspiracy theory falls apart when you take even a surface-level look into the results of the election.

Most of all, Giuliani admitted he didn’t actually have any evidence to back up any of his wild claims of fraud.

“And you have situations of stuffing the ballot box, and we will we will try to quantify those but those are harder to quantify,” Giuliani said at one point, making an extreme allegation that he said he had no facts to justify.

Arizona certifying its results as Giuliani spoke at the hearing is the latest failed effort by the Trump campaign to steal the election.

Trump has put pressure on Republicans in critical states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia to overturn their results and make Trump the winner. Yet the states have not followed that command.

All of those states save for Wisconsin have certified their results. And Wisconsin is set to certify its own results on Monday afternoon, after it held a recount that found Trump lost by more votes than previously thought.

Meanwhile, both state and federal judges are tossing out Trump lawsuits seeking to block vote certifications and throw out votes. Many of the judges are even dressing down the Trump campaign’s legal team for providing no evidence of their claims.

With the vote certification, Biden became the first Democrat since 1996 to win Arizona. And it’s only the second time in more than a half-century that a Democrat won the state.

Arizona on Monday also certified Democratic Sen.-elect Mark Kelly’s defeat over appointed GOP Sen. Martha McSally. McSally has now lost both of Arizona’s Senate seats — first losing the seat vacated by former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) in 2018, and now this seat once held by the late-Sen. John McCain.

Kelly will be sworn into the Senate on Wednesday.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.