Arizona Certifies Biden's Narrow Victory Over Trump

Arizona officials certified the state's election results Monday, formalizing Democrat Joe Biden’s narrow victory over Donald Trump even as the Republican president's attorneys continued making baseless claims of fraud in the state's vote count.

Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs certified the election results alongside Gov. Doug Ducey, Attorney General Mark Brnovich, both Republicans, and State Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Brutinel.

Biden is only the second Democrat in 70 years to win Arizona. In the final tally, Biden won by 10,457 votes, 0.3 percent of the nearly 3.4 million ballots cast. Eleven Democratic electors will meet Dec. 14 to formally pledge Arizona’s electoral votes to Biden.

Elections challenges brought by the Trump campaign or his backers in key battleground states have largely been unsuccessful as Trump continues to allege voter fraud while refusing to concede.

There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. In fact, election officials from both political parties have stated publicly that the election went well and international observers confirmed there were no serious irregularities.

Last week, a judge in Phoenix rejected the Arizona Republican Party’s bid to postpone the certification of election results in Maricopa County and dismissed the party’s legal challenge that sought a new audit of a sampling of ballots.

Lawyers for the state GOP were scheduled to be in court again Monday to argue for a fresh challenge of the verification process for mail ballots.

Even as state officials certified the results, Trump's lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, held a meeting at a downtown Phoenix hotel to lay out claims of irregularities in Arizona's vote count. But they did not provide evidence of widespread fraud.

Nine Republican lawmakers attended the hearing, which was expected to last for several hours. They had requested permission to hold a formal legislative hearing at the Capitol but were denied by the House speaker and Senate president.

The certification also paves the way for Democrat Mark Kelly to take his seat in the U.S. Senate, formalizing his victory in a special election to finish the last two years of the term of John McCain, who died in 2018. Kelly is scheduled to be sworn in on Wednesday in Washington.