By Howard Fischer
Capitol Media Services
PHOENIX -- Supporters of President Trump filed suit in federal court Wednesday in their latest bid to throw out the results of the certified popular vote that awarded the state's 11 electors to Joe Biden.The lawsuit alleges "widespread ballot fraud,'' due in part to what the challengers say are machines from Dominion Voting Systems, used in Maricopa County, which they say were designed purposely to take votes away from Trump. Attorney Sidney Powell specifically blames that on Eric Coomer, an executive with the company and "his visceral and public rage against the current U.S. president.''
And that, she said, is part of a criminal conspiracy.
It also claims that poll watchers were unable to adequately verify that the signatures on the envelopes of mail-in ballots were adequately verified.
Some of that, the lawsuit says, is due to "biased and partisan Maricopa County poll referees.'' And then there is the complaint that there were not enough people who were allowed to observe the process.
Overall, the legal papers charge, there were at least 412,494 illegal ballots counted in Arizona, far more than Biden's 10,547-vote margin over Trump.
That includes the claims of a phone survey done calling people who were listed as having requested early ballots.
The lawsuit says there were 518,560 unreturned early ballots. And using estimates based on the sample survey, it says that between 208,333 to 229,337 of these went to people who had not requested them.
"All of these absentee ballots were sent to someone besides the registered voter named in the request, and thus could have been filled out by anyone and then submitted in the name of another voter,'' it claims. And it says up to another 94,975 people -- based on the sample -- had returned ballots but did not have them recorded as voting.
"These absentee ballots were either lost or destroyed (consistent with allegations of Trump ballot destruction) and/or were replaced with blank ballots filled out by election workers, Dominion or other third parties,'' the lawsuit said.
And then there is the claim that 5,085 Arizona voters in the 2020 general election moved out of state prior to voting and were therefore ineligible.
All this, Powell says, is part of a "scheme and artifice'' to defraud the people of Arizona of a proper election.
"The fraud was executed by many means, but the most fundamentally troubling, insidious, and egregious ploy was the systematic adaption of old-fashioned 'ballot stuffing,'' she wrote. "It has not been amplified and rendered virtually invisible by computer software created and run by domestic and foreign actors for that very purpose.''
What Powell and her clients want is for the court to block the certification of the election results. That, in turn, would give the power to the Republican-controlled Arizona Legislature to decide who gets the electoral votes.
Prior lawsuits challenging the election -- including some by Powell's Arizona co-counsel Alexander Kolodin -- have been dismissed. That includes the "SharpieGate'' claim that the use of the markers resulted in false counts.
There is another lawsuit pending in Maricopa County Superior Court, this one with similar allegations that signatures on envelopes were not properly checked. A trial on that case is set to begin Thursday.