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- A crowd of around 200 people packed the parking lot outside of the Maricopa County Election Center in Arizona.
- The pro-Trump protesters chanted “Fox News sucks” in opposition to the network’s call for Arizona’s 11 electoral votes to go to Democratic nominee Joe Biden Tuesday night.
- Some in the crowd tried to get inside the building to see the vote count, Gadi Schwartz of MSNBC reported late Wednesday.
- The protest elicited comparisons to the Brooks Brothers Riot in Miami-Dade County back in the 2000 election.
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A crowd of around 200 people gathered late Thursday night outside of the Maricopa County Election Center in Arizona, creating a tense situation as thousands of votes from the state’s most populous county were being counted inside.
The pro-Trump group chanted “Fox News sucks” to register their opposition to the network’s early call for Arizona and its 11 electoral votes to go for Democratic nominee Joe Biden Tuesday night, well before other media outlets.
—Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) November 5, 2020
Some of those gathered outside of the Maricopa County Election Center in Phoenix demanded entry to the facility where the votes were being counted, according to MSNBC’s Gadi Schwartz.
Schwartz reported that the protesters asking law enforcement to let them inside were holding up smartphones and claiming they were journalists.
MSNBC came back to Schwartz for a second live shot, but he told the anchors he was unable to take his crew outside because protesters began crowding the entrance and yelling at them.
In his first live hit, the reporter noted how few of those gathered were wearing masks. Schwartz also said his camera operator was not using a light because the crowd had negative reactions to camera crews earlier in the night.
The protest elicted comparisons to the Brooks Brothers Riot in Miami-Dade County in the 2000 election, when pro-George W. Bush protesters were able to successfully shut down a recount that may have given the Florida lead to then-Vice President Al Gore.
However, the Arizona protesters chanted "count the vote," while other pro-Trump protesters in Detroit chanted the opposite earlier on Wednesday.
—The Recount (@therecount) November 5, 2020
Biden has been leading President Trump in Arizona since returns began coming in, with a few hundred thousand ballots left to count.
Many of those are early and mail-in votes from Maricopa County, where Biden has performed well and tends to outperform Trump, even more so among those who voted by mail.
Trump still has a chance of being able to to win Arizona, but surmounting Biden's lead given the makeup of the ballots left to be counted would be steep, and he would need to overperform the rate at which he's been getting votes thus far in the count.