Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey sent a lengthy string of tweets Monday night defending the state’s election process after being attacked by President Donald Trump for his handling of it.
“I’ve been pretty outspoken about Arizona’s election system, and bragged about it quite a bit, including in the Oval Office,” Ducey tweeted in part, praising the state’s election laws and practices as secure and empowering to voters.
Ducey pointed to the statute requiring Arizona’s secretary of state to canvass the election results in front of the governor and attorney general on the fourth Monday after the general election. “That was today,” he tweeted.
Earlier Monday, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, had certified the election results, saying the election process was the most secure in recent history, “despite unfounded claims to the contrary.” President-elect Joe Biden beat Trump by 10,457 votes in Arizona, the secretary of state’s office said.
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Ducey and Republican state Attorney General Mark Brnovich, along with Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Brutinel, witnessed the certification, as required by state law.
“The canvass of the election triggers a 5-day window for any elector to bring a credible challenge to the election results in court. If you want to contest the results, now is the time. Bring your challenges,” Ducey tweeted. “That’s the law. I’ve sworn an oath to uphold it, and I take my responsibility seriously.”
Despite states certifying their results and awarding electoral votes to Biden ahead of the Electoral College meeting on December 14, Trump has not conceded the election. Instead, he has continued to falsely claim that he won and to criticize officials who have refused to adopt his conspiratorial view of the election.
Ducey had said earlier Monday that he would sign official documentation and have it hand-delivered to the president of the US Senate, so that Senator-elect Mark Kelly could “be sworn in as swiftly as possible.”
In several tweets Monday night, Trump accused Ducey of “rushing to put a Democrat in office,” made baseless voter fraud allegations and vowed that “Republicans will long remember!” The President then retweeted a number of tweets about Ducey, including one that said: “Who needs Democrats when you have Republicans like Brian Kemp and Doug Ducey?”
The President has also recently attacked Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, another member of his own party, over fraud allegations.
Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers also formally certified Biden’s victory on Monday, signing the paperwork to award the state’s 10 electoral votes to the President-elect after a Trump campaign-requested recount in Wisconsin’s two most populous counties. Pennsylvania and Nevada each completed their certification processes last week.
Despite what Trump is tweeting and saying publicly in the wake of Arizona and Wisconsin certifying Biden’s victory Monday, two White House advisers told CNN that Trump sees the scoreboard and understands he has no chance of hanging on to the presidency.
CNN’s Nikki Carvajal, Bob Ortega and Jim Acosta contributed to this report.