Republican Roy Moore says he completed a lie detector test after the Alabama Senate election concluded to prove the allegations of sexual misconduct are untrue as he seeks to challenge his loss to Democrat Doug Jones.
“Also provided in the complaint is an affidavit from Judge Roy Moore stating that he successfully completed a polygraph test confirming the representations of misconduct made against him during the campaign are completely false,” Moore’s campaign said in a Wednesday press release.
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In a reliably Republican state, Moore’s campaign became rocked by multiple allegations of sexual misconduct. Several women accused the former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice of touching them sexually when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s.
One woman says she was 14 years old when Moore touched her sexually. Another accuser said Moore assaulted her when she was 16 years old, pushing her head toward his crotch in a locked car.
Moore, who has repeatedly denied the allegations, has defiantly refused to concede in the Senate race — despite President Trump urging him to accept the results.
Moore submitted an election complaint late Wednesday alleging potential voter fraud that could have impacted the results enough to tip the race toward his opponent.
The court filing comes hours before a board meeting in which state officials were scheduled to certify the victory of Jones, the first Democrat in decades to win a Senate seat in Alabama.
Sam Coleman, a spokesman for Jones, described the court filing as a “desperate attempt by Roy Moore to subvert the will of the people [that] will not succeed.”
“The election is over, it’s time to move on,” Coleman said in a statement to The Hill.
Moore is asking Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill to delay the meeting until an investigation can show whether voting “irregularities” impacted the election, telling his supporters to call Merrill, Gov. Kay Ivey and Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall to postpone the decision to certify Jones’s victory.
“The purpose of the complaint is to preserve evidence of potential election fraud and to postpone the certification of Alabama’s Special Election by Secretary of State John Merrill until a thorough investigation of potential election fraud, that improperly altered the outcome of this election, is conducted,” Moore’s campaign said in a statement.
“We call on Secretary of State Merrill to delay certification until there is a thorough investigation,” the statement continued, while pointing to “three independent election experts” who say there was “election fraud sufficient to overturn the outcome of the election.”
Merrill told CNN on Thursday that Jones would be certified as the election’s winner.