Arizona GOP chair vows to fight ‘to the end’ to reverse election results

PHOENIX – The chair of the Arizona Republican Party said Friday she has no intention of giving up the fight to reverse the certified results of the state’s presidential election any time soon.

“President [Donald] Trump won this election by a landslide in Arizona and across the country, and I’m going to go to the end to prove that that’s what happened,” Dr. Kelli Ward told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s The Mike Broomhead Show.

Ward, whose lawsuit over the ballot count in Maricopa County was dismissed Friday, made the claim the same week Arizona’s two top-ranking Republican elected officials, Gov. Doug Ducey and Attorney General Mark Brnovich, signed off on Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs’ election certification.

“The governor didn’t actually certify the election,” Ward said. “He just sent the fraudulent, potentially, results on, but that in itself is a terrible, terrible decision.”

The certified results showed President-elect Joe Biden winning Arizona by more than 10,000 votes to claim the state’s 11 electoral votes. As it stands, Biden won the presidency with an Electoral College advantage of 306-232 and will be inaugurated on Jan. 20.

Legal challenges by Trump and his allies would have to succeed in multiple states to change the result, and they have done little but rack up losses in courtrooms and recounts to this point.

U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr has said the Justice Department has uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the election.

Biden won in Maricopa County, the state’s most-populous region, by more than 45,000 votes in becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Arizona since 1996.

Ward pressed ahead with her lawsuit after four previous legal challenges to the validity of Arizona’s elections were dismissed.

As part of Ward’s case, a court-ordered sampling of 1,626 duplicated ballots found that Trump lost seven votes due to errors in ballot processing in Maricopa County.

Scott Jarrett, Maricopa County’s director of Election Day and emergency voting, said in court Thursday that Trump could have lost 103 votes if the error rate were extrapolated across all 27,800 duplicated ballots in the county, nowhere near enough to change the outcome.

But Ward remains undeterred.

“I’m not going to be quiet. I’m not going to stop talking about this because people want to brush it away and get on with their next big thing,” she said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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