A crowd of Donald Trump supporters, some armed with rifles and handguns, gathered outside an election centre in Arizona on Wednesday night after unsubstantiated rumours that votes for the Republican president were deliberately not being counted.
Chanting “Stop the steal!”, and “Count my vote”, the mostly unmasked protesters stood in front of the Maricopa County Elections Department in Phoenix, as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden held a razor thin lead in the critical battleground state. Some news outlets have called Arizona for Mr Biden, but Mr Trump’s campaign says it is still in play.
A victory for Mr Biden in Arizona would give the Democrat 11 electoral votes, a major boost in his bid to win the White House, while severely narrowing Mr Trump’s path to re-election, in a state the Republican won in 2016.
On Election night Fox News and the Associated Press called Arizona for Mr Biden, even though only just over 70 per cent of the vote had been counted, a move that infuriated Mr Trump and his aides.
Some of the roughly 200 protesters, who were faced by a line of armed county sheriffs, chanted “Shame on Fox!”. Some said they came out after a tweet from Mike Cernovich, a right-wing activist.
Supporters of Donald Trump rally outside the Maricopa County Recorder's Office, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020 Source: AAP
Chris Michael, 40, from Gilbert, Arizona, said he came to make sure all votes are counted. He said he wants assurances that the counting was done “ethically and legally.”
Rumors spread on Facebook Tuesday night that some Maricopa votes were not being counted because voters used Sharpie pens to mark their ballots. Local election officials insisted that was not true.
With the count still underway in several key states, Mr Trump has accused the Democrats of trying to steal the election without evidence and filed lawsuits in several states related to vote-counting.
A similar scene played out on Wednesday afternoon in downtown Detroit, where city election officials blocked about 30 people, mostly Republicans, from entering a vote-counting hall amid unfounded claims that the vote count was fraudulent.
Meanwhile, Police in the city of Portland made arrests and seized fireworks, hammers and a rifle after late night demonstrations, as Oregon Governor Kate Brown activated the state’s National Guard in response to “widespread violence”.
Authorities stand at the door of the Maricopa County Recorder's Office as Donald Trump's supporters rally outside Source: AP
Portland Police said it arrested ten people in the demonstrations after declaring riots in the city’s downtown area while the New York Police Department said it made about 50 arrests in protests that spread in the city late on Wednesday.
“All of the gatherings that were declared riots were downtown. We have made 10 arrests”, a Portland Police spokesman told Reuters in an emailed statement.
Demonstrations were also seen in a few other US cities on Wednesday night as activists demanding that vote counts proceed unimpeded rallied in several cities, including Atlanta, Detroit, New York, and Oakland.
Earlier on Wednesday, about 100 people gathered for an interfaith event before a planned march through downtown Detroit, in the battleground state of Michigan, to demand a full vote count and what they called a peaceful transition of power.
Local partners of Protect the Results - a coalition of more than 165 grassroots organizations, advocacy groups and labor unions - have organised over 100 events planned across the country between Wednesday and Saturday.
Heading into the election, the United States had seen months of protests following the death in May of George Floyd, an African-American who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
The protests once again picked up momentum following the police shooting later in the year of an African-American named Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin and more recently of 27-year-old Walter Wallace Jr. who was gunned down by two officers in Philadelphia.
