The chairwoman of the Arizona Republican party, Kelli Ward, announced Wednesday that her party has completed the inspection of a sample of duplicate ballots in the state, and found that two ballots cast for Trump were altered.
A duplicate ballot is a ballot that’s either damaged or is unable to be read by the tabulation machine. Election workers then have to duplicate the original ballot onto another ballot to be processed by the machine.
A local court had granted the inspection as a part of the election petition filed by Ward. The sample of 100 duplicate ballots were selected at random by elections officials.
According to the chairwoman, one of the original ballots showed that the person voted for President Trump, but the duplicated copy switched the vote to Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Another original ballot showed the person voted for Trump, but the duplicate copy was voided.
President Trump and Biden are separated in Arizona by some 10,000 votes or 0.3 percent. Therefore a 2 percent error is significant enough to alter the outcome.
The president tweeted the same day, “This would be, if carried forward, approximately 90,000 votes more than we would need to win the State.”
Elections officials in Maricopa County then agreed to expand the inspection to 2,500 additional duplicate ballots. There are approximately 28,000 duplicate ballots in Maricopa County.
Despite ongoing lawsuits in Arizona, Democratic senate candidate Mark Kelly was sworn into the U.S. Senate on Wednesday, replacing Republican Martha McSally.
