Chaos hit the election count center in a crucial Arizona county on Wednesday night after a large group of Trump supporters gathered outside to protest and one woman even made her way inside the building to disrupt the count, as the race in the must-win state tightened.
The Maricopa County center in Phoenix was forced to close to the public, locking poll workers inside, when supporters of the president surrounded the building chanting 'count the vote'.
It came after the Trump campaign and several major commentators criticized the decision of Fox News and the Associated Press to call the state for his rival Joe Biden with only 86 percent of the votes reported and no clear winner.
Despite the early calls, Arizona emerged on Wednesday as a major battleground state as Trump crawled back Biden's advantage in Maricopa County, in particular, suggesting the Fox had taken the leap too soon.
Maricopa is the largest county in Arizona, home to Phoenix and 62 percent of the state's 7.28 million residents, and a candidate cannot win the state without it.
As it stands, Biden needs Arizona to win the presidency, as does Trump. The former vice president needs to carry just two more states to reach the all-important 270 electoral college seats and claim victory.
Biden was initially showing a lead in the hundreds of thousands in the Arizona count but it has dwindled drastically from over 200,000 to 79,000 votes. The latest update at 9pm EST revealed Trump netted 13,644 more votes, cutting Biden's advantage down yet again.
Whereas mail-in ballots have tended to sway toward Biden in other parts of the country, Maricopa is showing a surprising surge for Trump, meaning that Arizona is still up for grabs by either candidate with 400,000 ballots not yet counted.
However, Trump would need to win approximately 57 percent of the remaining votes in the state to claim victory, over performing in every county.
The nail-biting Arizona count continued as Republicans launched legal challenges in Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia over vote counting. Trump protesters also surrounded an election in Detroit where they called on the count to be stopped.
Video footage from outside the Maricopa count center on Wednesday showed the angered crowd as they shouted and chanted that the vote was being suppressed and that the election was unfair.
Some fumed about a rumor that was circulating from right-wing social media accounts throughout the day that claimed that the ballots of some Trump supporters were being disregarded because they were filled out using a Sharpie.
County officials have reassured voters that this is not true but unsettled fans of the president still decided to gather at the count on Wednesday as they called to be let inside to see the votes being counted.
There is no evidence that any of the votes cast are not being counted in the county or in the state.
Several members of the group AZ Patriots did successfully manage to make their way inside the building, one wearing a military vest, where they argued that the pens in the count had been changed to Sharpies, before they were kicked out of the building.
Media crews were escorted from the center at around 12.30am and some staff were also escorted from the building at the end of their shifts as the shouts of the crowd grew louder. There have been no reports of violence although several members of the press claimed they were threatened.
Inside, the count continued, with the center vowing that it would continue until the last update of the night.
'Staff at the @maricopacounty Elections Department will continue our job, which is to administer elections in the second largest voting jurisdiction in the county,' the department tweeted.
'We will release results again tonight as planned. We thank the @mcsoaz for doing their job, so we can do ours.'
Among the protesters was local Congressman Paul Gosar who joined the crowd in complaining that votes were not being counted, blasting the Arizona Secretary of State as a 'joke' and praying, before demanding an update on the tally.
'Some shady things are happening in Arizona...' he tweeted earlier in the day.
Gosar made the claim after Fox News faced outrage for deciding to call the state's eleven electoral college seats for Biden before midnight on election night. The Associated Press has since also called a Biden victory but the New York Times and CNN are among the major news organization believing the race is still there for either candidate.
The emergence of Arizona as battleground state came as:
- Trump filed new lawsuits in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia over the vote count
- He sent son Eric and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to Pennsylvania where they made claims about fraudulent mail-in ballots and accused the Democrats of cheating
- The president's supporters also mobbed counting hall in Detroit where instead they shouted 'Stop the Vote' as the Trump campaign accused the state of not providing 'meaningful access' to the count
- Yet, Biden wins in Wisconsin and Michigan moved him to 264 electoral votes and just six votes away from winning the presidency
- Biden also edged closer to a potential upset in Georgia, coming within 1 point of Trump
- The former Vice President's odds to win the election hit an all-time high of 87 percent
- Anti-Trump protesters clashed with cops in New York City
- On Wednesday night, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis railed against the decision to call Arizona and said that Fox should immediate rescind the decision.
'Trump is gaining in Arizona. There are probably 500,000…' DeSantis said during an interview with Fox. 'Here's my thing, if you're quick on the trigger, then be quick on the trigger for both sides and stand by it. With Trump, they never want to call the state. Biden, they will do it right away. It's inconsistent and unacceptable. Look, North Carolina should be called for the president, for sure. Arizona — Fox should rescind that call.'
'We have to do this in a right way,' DeSantis continued. 'I thought it was really poor how it was done. Florida, we didn't even need the panhandle coming in. The president was up so much with the basis of Miami-Dade [county] early in mail voting that here was no way he would lose by Florida and won by 400,000 votes in the end.'
FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver, who has himself been criticized for wildly inaccurate polling data, also said that Fox and the Associated Press should retracted the projection.
The Arizona call from Fox was the first of the states that appeared to have flipped from red to blue, marking a major loss for the Trump campaign in this must-win state if it were accurate.
Yet the Trump campaign has argued that the voting is not yet over, dismissing the call and predicting that the president will eventually win by some 30,000 votes once all ballots are counted.
They have also said they are considering contesting the result but have not indicated what action they would take after calling for a recount in Wisconsin and filing lawsuits over vote counting in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia.
'@FoxNews is a complete outlier in calling Arizona, and other media outlets should not follow suit,' fumed Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller on Tuesday night.
'There are still 1M+ Election Day votes out there waiting to be counted - we pushed our people to vote on Election Day, but now Fox News is trying to invalidate their votes!
'We believe over 2/3 of those outstanding Election Day voters are going to be for Trump. Can't believe Fox was so anxious to pull the trigger here after taking so long to call Florida. Wow,' he continued.
'Retract AZ!' added Republican National Committee spokesperson Liz Harrington.
Arizona's governor Doug Ducey, a Republican, also pushed back at the Fox News result calling it 'far too early' to have declared Biden the winner in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
'Election Day votes are not fully reported, and we haven't even started to count early ballots dropped off at the polls. In AZ, we protected Election Day. Let's count the votes—all the votes—before making declarations.'
Trump himself was enraged by the call and rang Rupert Murdoch in a fury on Tuesday night, according to reports.
A source told Vanity Fair that Trump phoned Murdoch, who owns Fox, 'to scream about the call and demand a retraction'.
The 89-year-old media mogul refused to order his staff to retract the Arizona call.
Even within Fox, the Arizona announcement allegedly angered staff, Vanity Fair reports.
'We called it long before MSNBC!' one outraged staffer on the opinion side told the magazine.
'We were so worried about being seen as pro-Trump that we bent over backwards.'
And on air, the hosts questioned the decision desk for the call.
'The Trump campaign is, how shall I put this, livid about the fact that Arizona was called,' Fox White House correspondent John Roberts reported around 12:20am Wednesday morning.
'Frankly, there have been public calls for Fox to pull back that call. I'll leave that to the decision desk, but that's what the Trump campaign is saying.'
Yet those behind the decision have defended the call and maintained they were right to call the race for Biden when they did.
'We're four standard deviations from being wrong,' Arnon Mishkin, director of the Fox News Decision Desk, said of the network's statistical model. 'And, I'm sorry, we're not wrong in this particular case.'
He also acknowledged that there were outstanding votes to be counted in the state but that they were mainly in areas in which Biden was performing well, according to Politico.
'I'm sorry, the president is not going to be able to take over and win enough votes to eliminate that seven point lead' Mishkin added.
Fox News politics editor Chris Stirewalt also defended the decision on-air stating that the remaining mail-in ballots would sway heavily in Biden's favor. '
The Associated Press stated they also made the call for this reasons.
Trump took Arizona in 2016 by a margin of 3.5 percent. A Biden victory in the state would make him the first Democrat to win Arizona since Bill Clinton in 1996.
Yet much of the Arizona result hangs on Maricopa County which Trump won the county four years ago, with 49 percent of the vote to Hillary Clinton's 46 percent.
Officials say that there are still between 428,000 and 446,000 ballots to count in the county, including 248,000 mail ballots that were returned in the last three days before the election.
They also include between 160,000 and 180,000 mail ballots returned on Election Day and 18,000 provisional ballots, according to the Maricopa County Recorder's Office.
Trump may contest the validity of the mail-in ballots as he has in other states.
Trump took Arizona in 2016 by a margin of 3.5 percent. A Biden victory in the state would make him the first Democrat to win Arizona since Bill Clinton in 1996.
Yet much of the Arizona result hangs on Maricopa County which Trump won the county four years ago, with 49 percent of the vote to Hillary Clinton's 46 percent.
Officials say that there are still between 428,000 and 446,000 ballots to count in the county, including 248,000 mail ballots that were returned in the last three days before the election.
They also include between 160,000 and 180,000 mail ballots returned on Election Day and 18,000 provisional ballots, according to the Maricopa County Recorder's Office.
Trump may contest the validity of the mail-in ballots as he has in other states.
On Tuesday, false stories were circulating among right-wing social media accounts that votes cast for Trump were not counted in Maricopa County because voters used Sharpie pens.
Dubbed 'Sharpiegate' by conservatives on social media, the allegations could be used to try to undermine election results in the historically Republican state.
County officials were trying to inform voters that Sharpies did not interfere with ballots.
Yet, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of several voters Wednesday alleging that the use of a Sharpie permanent marker at polling places across the county disenfranchised voters.
Attorney Alexander Kolodin is representing an Arizona woman named as Laurie Aguilera by 12 News as well as ten other unidentified voters in the state.
'Plaintiff completed her ballot with the provided Sharpie. While completing it, she noticed the ink was bleeding through,' the suit reads. It goes on to say that the machine failed to read Aguilera's ballot and those poll workers would not provide her with a second ballot nor a duplicate ballot when the ballot was not read. She believes her vote was not counted.
'I should just know that when I put my ballot into the machine and if I followed the instructions it gets counted, and it gets counted perfectly,' Kolodin said Wednesday night.
Elsewhere, the Republican party themselves have filled lawsuits in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia and called for a recount in Wisconsin, claiming that fake mail-in ballots for Biden were being created in order to hand him the win.
The claims of fraud led to protests in Detroit calling on the vote count to stop.
Back in Arizona, it was also revealed earlier Wednesday that a data feed informing media organizations of the voting tally in the state was incorrectly showing that 98 percent of its votes had been counted for a period on Wednesday morning, casting further skepticism on the early calls.
In fact, only 86 percent had been tallied at the time, leaving hundreds of thousands more votes still to be taken into account.
Edison Research data incorrectly displayed the percentage of votes counted for a brief period before being rectified, according to The Hill.
The error was noted by New York Times editor Patrick LaForge, whose publication has shown a Biden lead throughout Wednesday but do not believe that his victory is yet certain.
'An error was found in the data feed from Edison Research (used by @nytimes and other news organizations) for Arizona results -- 86 percent of ballots have been counted, not 98 percent,' LaForge wrote.
State officials have given no indication of when final results from Arizona will be available.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
