During his bombshell speech on Tuesday, President Trump alluded to the SharpieGate controversy, saying damaged Arizona ballots were tossed out.
President Trump spoke on Tuesday to address his ongoing efforts to “expose the tremendous voter fraud and irregularities” that took place during this election. In his opening statement, the President argued that “lots of bad things happened” in the weeks and months of the election, “especially when you have to prove almost nothing to exercise our greatest privilege, the right to vote.” As National File reported:
The President proclaimed that the American election system is “now under coordinated assault and siege.” This comes after many instances of voter fraud and irregularities were reported during hearings held by state legislators in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Michigan. He noted that both him and Joe Biden were warned against declaring a “premature victory” and that it would take a significant amount of time to verify the results of the election, as a result of the widespread use of mail-in ballots.
Statement by Donald J. Trump, The President of the United States
Full Video: https://t.co/EHqzsLbbJG pic.twitter.com/Eu4IsLNsKD
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2020
During the speech, President Trump alluded to the SharpieGate controversy in Arizona. Republican voters on election day in Maricopa County in Arizona reported that they were forced to use Sharpies, rather than ballpoint pens, and were concerned that there would be bleedthroughs, and therefore invalidate the ballots. The hashtag “SharpieGate” went viral, with Arizona voters posting their concerns all over social media.
“In Arizona, in person voters whose ballots produced error messages from tabulation machines were told to press a button that resulted in their votes not being counted,” the President said during his speech. This seems to be the same “green button” that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and expert witness Colonel Phil Waldron referred to during the Arizona hearing on election integrity on Monday.
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“Tell us about the green button in Maricopa County on the machine,” Giuliani asked Waldron. “There is one witness that is going to testify that all day she saw election officials constantly pressing the green button when somebody was voting.”
“I believe this was also linked to another witness that’s going to talk about the differences between the pens and the sharpies,” Waldron replied. “The Maricopa elections division in early voting they specified to only use ballpoint pens for voting, and then on election day they specified only use sharpies.”
“The green button was to say “okay there’s an error, so go ahead and push ‘cast ballot’,” and it punches that into an error file that can be adjudicated by the election administrator,” Waldron continued, after noting that the error ballots would be created by a bleedthrough by using Sharpies.
President Trump also mentioned in his speech that the Arizona Attorney General had announced that “mail-in ballots had been stolen from mailboxes and hidden under a rock.” The ballots were found on October 30th, only a few days before election day itself, and had been stolen from various mailboxes in Glendale. The ballots that were found were hand-delivered to voters, but media reporting noted at the time that they may not have been the only victims.
We appreciate @GlendaleAZPD working with us to get these ballots in the right hands. Tampering with our elections is wrong and illegal. Anyone with information about this incident should contact our office right away. Details: https://t.co/jksS1jRv2h pic.twitter.com/mAY3vNrTN5
— Mark Brnovich (@GeneralBrnovich) November 3, 2020
You can view the President’s speech in full below – his remarks about Arizona quoted in this article begin at 37:16:
