In the US state of Arizona, confidants of former US President Donald Trump have to answer in court for possible fraud in the 2020 presidential election. They are said to be guilty of conspiring to manipulate the election by, among other things, impersonating voters to enable Trump’s re-election in 2020, according to the indictment published on Wednesday.
Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani is also among the defendants, admitted his spokesman Ted Goodman. His name and the names of seven other defendants have been redacted until the indictment is served, the Arizona Attorney General said. One of the defendants is listed in court documents as chief of staff in 2020 – a position held at the White House by Mark Meadows at the time. The court documents also list a “former US president”, Trump, as an unindicted co-conspirator of the 18 defendants.
Representatives for Meadows and Trump did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters. Arizona was one of seven states where Trump’s allies tried to secure the state’s electoral votes for Trump, even though they came after the election of Joe Biden.
The President of the United States is elected by the electors of the individual states who cast their votes in the so-called Electoral College. In Arizona and almost all other states, the election winner receives all of the electoral votes in that state. To become president, a candidate needs 270 votes – the majority of the 538 electoral votes.
The distribution of votes depends on the population of the respective state. Arizona has eleven electoral votes. Alleged election fraud is the subject of two other criminal cases in Washington DC and Georgia in which Trump is accused of illegally trying to overturn Biden’s victory.