Fact Check: 35,000 Votes Were NOT Added To Every Democratic Candidate In Arizona

Fact Check

  • by: Dana Ford
Fact Check: 35,000 Votes Were NOT Added To Every Democratic Candidate In Arizona Bad Math

Were 35,000 votes added to every Democratic candidate in Arizona? No, that's not true: There's no evidence to support that statement. In some legislative races, Democratic candidates received fewer than 35,000 votes total, which makes the claim illogical as well as impossible. A spokeswoman for the Arizona secretary of state said the accusation was "absolutely false."

The claim surfaced during a Fox Business interview (archived here) between Lou Dobbs and Sidney Powell on November 24, 2020. Powell, a former federal prosecutor, was identified on the show as a member of Donald Trump's legal team, although his campaign had two days earlier disavowed her. During the segment, Powell said:

We've got one witness that says in Arizona at least there were 35,000 votes added to every Democratic candidate just to start their voting off. It's like getting your $500 of Monopoly money to begin with when you haven't done anything -- and it was only for Democrats.

Click below to watch the video on YouTube:

There may well be a person who claims what Powell said, but what that person purportedly claims cannot be true, given the 2020 election results reported by the Arizona secretary of state. In some legislative races, Democratic candidates received fewer than 35,000 votes total.

For example, in the race for the 29th Legislative District in the Arizona House of Representatives, Democratic candidate Richard Andrade received 32,075 votes. In the race for the 30th District, Raquel Teran and Robert Meza, both Democrats, got 34,106 and 30,546 votes, respectively. While in the 4th District, Democratic candidate Geraldine Peten received 29,342 votes. None of those tallies would be possible if 35,000 votes were added to every Democratic candidate in Arizona. The numbers aren't there.

In some races, 35,000 fewer votes for the Democratic candidate would have flipped the outcome of the election. Joe Biden and Donald Trump were separated by some 10,500 votes in Arizona, a battleground state. Other races were decided by a margin of more than 35,000 votes. In the Arizona Senate race, for example, Mark Kelly, a Democrat, defeated Martha McSally, a Republican, by close to 79,000 votes.

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has repeatedly defended the integrity of her state's election. In a letter to the president of the Arizona Senate, dated November 10, 2020, Hobbs wrote:

To be clear, there is no 'current controversy' regarding elections in Arizona, outside of theories floated by those seeking to undermine our democratic process for political gain. Elected officials should work to build, rather than damage, public confidence in our system. As we've seen in recent days, even efforts ostensibly aimed at knocking down misinformation can actually amplify it.

The administration of the 2020 election has been, by all measures, a rousing success in Arizona -- despite the unprecedented challenges that confronted our state and county election officials.

You can see the full text of her letter here:

Lead Stories reached out to Hobbs' office for comment on this story. Spokeswoman Sophia Solis responded with a one-sentence statement about the claim that 35,000 votes were added to every Democratic candidate:

It is absolutely false.

Want to inform others about the accuracy of this story?

See who is sharing it (it might even be your friends...) and leave the link in the comments.:

This fact check is available at IFCN's 2020 US Elections #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Click here, for more.


  Dana Ford

Dana Ford is an Atlanta-based reporter and editor. She previously worked as a senior editor at Atlanta Magazine Custom Media and as a writer/ editor for CNN Digital. Ford has more than a decade of news experience, including several years spent working in Latin America.

Read more about or contact Dana Ford

About Us

International Fact-Checking Organization Meta Third-Party Fact Checker

Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
Spotted something? Let us know!.

Lead Stories is a:


@leadstories

Subscribe to our newsletter

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Lead Stories LLC:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Most Read

Most Recent

Share your opinion