By Allen Zhong
President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC) on Saturday filed a lawsuit in Arizona over alleged rejected votes in Maricopa County.
The Trump campaign stated that some in-person votes were disregarded because of alleged improper guidance provided by the poll workers.
“When a machine detects an overvote on a ballot, poll workers should inform in-person voters of the error and give them an opportunity to correct the issue. Instead, poll workers in Maricopa County pressed, and told voters to press, a green button to override the error,” the campaign said in a statement. “As a result, the machines disregarded the voter’s choices in the overvoted races.”
The campaign and RNC allege that the problem was caused by poll workers who were struggling to operate the new voting machines and are asking the county to inspect any overridden in-person ballots manually, the same way that poll workers handle mail-in or drop-off ballots.
The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden currently holds a narrow lead in Arizona. Maricopa County is the biggest election district of Arizona, contributing over half of the votes for both candidates.
Over the past few days, Trump has been vocal about the need to protect the sanctity of the ballot box while claiming that Democrats are trying to “steal” the election from him, in part through counting late-arriving ballots. Trump’s legal teams are arguing that mail-in ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 but received after election day should not be counted and that votes that were counted without Republican observers present in the ballot-counting centers should also be considered “illegal votes.”
Earlier in the day, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani announced that Trump’s re-election campaign will launch a lawsuit in Pennsylvania to challenge mail-in ballots that have been counted without Republican poll watchers onsite.
“We’re going to file a federal lawsuit that will cover here [Philadelphia] and Pittsburgh, and we will have as many witnesses as the court needs. Right now, it could be as many as 90 witnesses,” Giuliani said.
