Former UFC light-heavyweight champion Tito Ortiz has filed a petition asking California authorities to recount the votes cast in the presidential election.
Ortiz, who strongly supports President Donald Trump and the “Latinos for Trump” campaign, tweeted a link to the petition on Wednesday from his official Twitter account.
The petition, which at the time of writing was signed by just over 160 people, calls for a “fair recount” of the votes cast in California in the presidential election.
“The people of California will no longer tolerate our corrupt government claiming Democratic victory with zero counted precincts,” the petition says.
“The people of California invested a lot of time in 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 recount of the state!”
https://t.co/muFafZwhZZ
– Tito Ortiz (@titoortiz) November 5, 2020
On Wednesday, Trump hastily claimed that he won the election before all the votes were counted and that a “big fraud” was being committed.
Although the president did not present any evidence to support his claim, his campaign has filed several lawsuits on the major battlefields of Wisconsin, Michigan – both on behalf of Joe Biden-Pennsylvania and Georgia.
However, neither Trump nor his campaign went so far as to suggest electoral fraud in California.
The Associated Press proclaimed the Golden State for Joe Biden on election day at 8:00 p.m. PT and assigned the 55 votes of the state electoral college to the Democratic presidential candidate. Data from the National Election Pool and Edison Research show that Biden received 7.88 million votes in 74 percent of the reported votes, while Trump’s record was 3.96 million votes.
In percentage terms, Biden received 65.3 percent of the previously reported 74 percent of the votes, while the President received 32.9 percent of the votes. The numbers are broadly consistent with pre-election projections.
According to FiveThirtyEight’s average of the polls in the presidential election, Biden was expected to receive 62 percent of the vote in California, while Trump was currently 26 percent behind with 36 percent.
They are also consistent with recent historical trends that Democratic candidates received at least 60 percent of the vote in the last three presidential elections.
Barack Obama captured the state with 61 percent of the vote in 2008 and 60.2 percent when he won a second term four years later, while Hillary Clinton won 61.7 percent of the vote in 2016, compared with Trump’s 31.6 percent.
California has been a Republican stronghold for three decades-except for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, no Democratic candidate won the state between 1948 and 1992-and has become a safe bet for Democrats over the past 30 years by 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 the Los Angeles Times, the 45-year-old, who used the campaign slogan “Make Huntington Beach Great Again” as his campaign slogan, won 14.2 percent of the votes for a candidate with 15 constituencies, almost 8,000 votes more than the next best candidate.
