Former UFC light-heavyweight champion Tito Ortiz has shared a petition calling for authorities in California to recount votes cast in the presidential election.
An outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump and of the Latinos for Trump campaign, Ortiz tweeted a link to the petition from his official Twitter account on Wednesday.
The petition, which at the time of writing has been signed by just over 160 people, calls for a “fair recount” of the votes cast in California in the presidential elections.
“The people of California are no longer going to tolerate our corrupt Government to claim victory for Democrats with zero precincts counted,” the petition reads.
“The people of California invested heavily their time into Trump rallies in San Diego, Big Bear, Newport Beach, Santa Barbara, Temecula, Rancho Cucamonga, Glendora, Lake Elsinore, Dana Point, Carlsbad. We will not let the Corrupt democrats give away our state !!
“We the People of California Demand a fair count of the state!”
On Wednesday, Trump prematurely claimed he had won the election before all the votes were counted and that a “major fraud” was being committed.
While the president did not offer any evidence to corroborate his claim, his campaign has filed several lawsuits in they key battlegrounds of Wisconsin, Michigan—both of which have been called for Joe Biden—Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Not even Trump nor his campaign, however, went as far as suggesting electoral fraud had been committed in California.
The Associated Press called the Golden State for Joe Biden at 8 p.m. PT on Election Day, assigning the state’s 55 Electoral College votes to the Democratic presidential candidate. Data from the National Election Pool and Edison Research shows that with 74 percent of votes reported, Biden had received 7.88 million votes, with Trump’s tally standing at 3.96 million votes.
In percentage terms, Biden won 65.3 percent of the 74 percent of votes reported so far, while the president secured 32.9 percent of votes. The figures are broadly in line with pre-election forecasts.
According to FiveThirtyEight’s average of presidential election polls, Biden was expected to receive 62 percent of votes in California, with Trump currently polling 26 points behind at 36 percent.
They are also consistent with recent historical trends, which has seen Democratic candidates win at least 60 percent of votes in the last three presidential election.
Barack Obama took the state with 61 percent of votes in 2008 and 60.2 percent as he won a second term four years later, while in 2016 Hillary Clinton won 61.7 percent of votes compared to Trump’s 31.6 percent.
A Republican stronghold for three decades—aside from Lyndon Johnson in 1964, no Democratic candidate won the state between 1948 and 1992—California has developed into a safe bet for the Democrats over the past 30 years, voting for the party in the last eight presidential elections.
Ortiz, meanwhile, won one of the three vacant seats on the City Council of his hometown of Huntington Beach, California.
According to figures tallied by the Los Angeles Times, the 45-year-old, who used “Make Huntington Beach Great Again” as his campaign slogan, won 14.2 percent of the votes out of a 15-field candidate, securing almost 8,000 votes more than the next-highest candidate.
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