title: Bosnian language

text: The Bosnian language, as a new normative register of the Shtokavian dialect, was officially introduced in 1996 with the publication of "" in Sarajevo. According to that work, Bosnian differed from Serbian and Croatian on some main linguistic characteristics, such as: sound formats in some words, especially "h" ( versus Serbian ); substantial and deliberate usage of Oriental ("Turkish") words; spelling of future tense () as in Croatian but not Serbian () (both forms have the same pronunciation). 2018, in the new issue of , words without "h" are accepted due to their prevalence in language practice.


title: Peter Billingsley

text: Peter Billingsley (born April 16, 1971), also known as Peter Michaelsen and Peter Billingsley-Michaelsen, is an American actor and filmmaker. His acting roles include Ralphie Parker in the 1983 movie "A Christmas Story", Jack Simmons in "The Dirt Bike Kid", Billy in "Death Valley", and Messy Marvin in Hershey's chocolate syrup commercials during the 1980s. While an infant he began acting in television commercials.


title: Peter Billingsley

text: Peter was born in New York City. His father, Alwin Michaelsen, is a financial consultant, and his mother, Gail, was once Alwin's secretary. She is the niece of Stork Club owner Sherman Billingsley, and the cousin of Glenn Billingsley who was married to actress Barbara Billingsley.


title: Peter Billingsley

text: All five of the children in the family had acting careers when they were young. The older Billingsleys, Dina and Win, had the briefest acting careers working mostly in commercials, with minor guest spots on television shows. Peter's elder sister, Melissa, is best known for her role as Maxx Davis on "Me and Maxx". Peter's older brother, Neil, began playing Danny Walton on the daytime soap opera "Search for Tomorrow" in 1975 and has had numerous roles in commercials and guest shots on TV series.


title: Peter Billingsley

text: Peter Billingsley received his early childhood education from a combination of tutors, public schools, and private institutions (including the Professional Children's School in New York City), Phoenix Country Day School in Paradise Valley, Arizona and Longview Elementary School in Phoenix and eventually passed his California High School Proficiency Exam at the age of 14. He seems to have also attended some public secondary schools following the GED, including Arcadia High School (in Phoenix).


title: Peter Billingsley

text: Billingsley was a spokesman for the young astronaut program and was present in 1986 at launch pad 39B (at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida) for the doomed launch of the Space Shuttle" Challenger".


title: Peter Billingsley

text: Billingsley's first acting role was when he was 2 in a Geritol commercial. He went on to star in about 120 television advertisements throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. At 12 he was quoted as saying, "After 100 [commercials], you lose count." He was best known for a series of commercials for Hershey's chocolate syrup in which he portrayed the character Messy Marvin. One of Billingsley's earliest film roles was in 1978's "If Ever I See You Again", written and directed by Joseph Brooks.


title: Peter Billingsley

text: His role in 1981's "Paternity" opposite Burt Reynolds earned a nomination for "Best Young Comedian – Motion Picture or Television" at the Young Artist Awards. In 1981, he appeared in "Honky Tonk Freeway". In 1982, Billingsley starred in several features, including "Death Valley", "Massarati and the Brain", and the made-for-TV movie "Memories Never Die" with Lindsay Wagner and his sister, Melissa. He had a featured guest role as Gideon Hale on "Little House on the Prairie", began a three-year stint as a co-host on NBC's popular "Real People" (for which he earned another Young Artist Award nomination), and hosted a two-episode offshoot of the show called "Real Kids".


title: Peter Billingsley

text: In 1983, Billingsley starred in "A Christmas Story", based on Jean Shepherd's "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash", which built its audience slowly over the years and is now broadcast each year for 24 hours from Christmas Eve until Christmas Day on TBS. The film earned Billingsley another Young Artist Award nomination, and is arguably the one role with which he is most associated. He has been quoted as saying that people still approach him on the street, only to say "you'll shoot your eye out, kid!" After about 40 years, he reprised the role in a sequel film titled "A Christmas Story Christmas" directed by Clay Kaytis for HBO Max.


title: Peter Billingsley

text: In 1984, Billingsley starred in an adaptation of "The Hoboken Chicken Emergency" with Dick Van Patten and Gabe Kaplan, a special Thanksgiving episode of the PBS series "WonderWorks". He appeared on a "Super Teen" special edition of "Family Feud", and on "Celebrity Hot Potato".


title: Peter Billingsley

text: As the late 1980s approached, Billingsley's acting career slowed. He made guest appearances on "Who's the Boss?", "Punky Brewster", "The Wonder Years", and "Highway to Heaven". He appeared in "The Dirt Bike Kid" (for which he won a Young Artist Award), "Russkies", and "Beverly Hills Brats".


title: Peter Billingsley

text: The early 1990s had Billingsley tackling older roles such as a would-be athlete who gets hooked on steroids in the CBS Schoolbreak Special "The Fourth Man". On the project he formed a close friendship with Vince Vaughn. His next Schoolbreak Special appearance was in "The Writing on the Wall" (1994), starring Hal Linden as a rabbi who teaches three boys about the horrors of intolerance after they are caught defacing his home, temple, and car with swastikas and antisemitic graffiti. Billingsley was nominated for an Emmy Award for the role.


title: Peter Billingsley

text: The most rewarding of his later film acting assignments was "Arcade" (1993), in which he starred as a teenaged "virtual reality" addict; he worked as the postproduction supervisor (credited as Peter Michaelsen). He made some career decisions and began working behind the scenes more often. Known as Peter Michaelsen, he was assistant editor on "Knights", a film which featured Kris Kristofferson. In 1994, Peter starred in, wrote, and directed (credited as Peter Billingsley) the short film "The Sacred Fire", and credited as Peter Michaelsen as the executive producer. The film won an Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films' Golden Scroll Award.


title: Peter Billingsley

text: His career behind the scenes continued, including work on The Discovery Channel's "A.R.K.: The New Adventures of Animal Rescue Kids", "The X Show", "Made", and "Elf", in which he has a cameo appearance.


title: Peter Billingsley

text: In 2001, he was nominated for an Emmy Award as co-executive producer for the show "Dinner for Five". In 2005, he helped produce the movie "Zathura". He was an executive producer for the Universal Pictures production "The Break-Up" in which he had a small acting role (as Andrew), appearing alongside frequent collaborator Jon Favreau. Billingsley served as executive producer on director Favreau's "Iron Man" feature film; he also acted in the film playing William Ginter Riva, a scientist who works for Obadiah Stane; he reprised the role later in 2019 in the film "".


title: Peter Billingsley

text: Billingsley, Favreau, and Vaughn appeared in "Four Christmases" (2008). "Couples Retreat" (2009) starring Favreau and Vaughn was Billingsley's first major film as director and was followed by his second directorial effort "Term Life", which also starred Vaughn.


title: Peter Billingsley

text: Billingsley's acting career continues, as well, with roles in "", "Elf", "L.A. Heat", and "No Deposit, No Return", which was voted Best Feature Film at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival in 2000. He took an acting part in an experimental film for the new Maxivision 48 projection system which was developed by Dean Goodhill.


title: Peter Billingsley

text: Billingsley released a CD titled "Christmas Stories...Christmas Songs" on Run For Cover Records in 1999 with longtime friend Brian Evans. He signed on as executive producer of a musical adaptation of "A Christmas Story" that opened in Seattle in December 2010. He said he was "honored to be a part of this project and looks forward to bringing the play to more stages... Just think about the idea of a leg-lamp kickline."


title: Peter Billingsley

text: On January 20, 2022, it was announced that Billingsley is reprising his role as Ralphie in a sequel to "A Christmas Story" titled "A Christmas Story Christmas" for Warner Bros. Pictures and HBO Max.


title: Al Lewis (actor)

text: Al Lewis (born Abraham Meister; April 30, 1923 – February 3, 2006) was an American actor and activist, best known for his role as Count Dracula-lookalike Grandpa on the television series "The Munsters" from 1964 to 1966 and its film versions. He previously also co-starred with "The Munsters"’s Fred Gwynne in the television show "Car 54, Where Are You? " from 1961–1963. Later in life, he was a restaurant owner, political candidate, and radio broadcaster.


title: Al Lewis (actor)

text: Lewis was born Abraham Meister on April 30, 1923 in Manhattan; the son of Alexander Meister, house painter and immigrant from Minsk, Belarus, and Ida Neidel, garment worker and immigrant from the Russian Empire; his family was Jewish. Two brothers were Phillip and Henry. He had originally given his birth year as 1910. His reputed early radio work in the mid-1930s would indicate the earlier birth date, as did an off-the-cuff remark on the TVLegends interview, 2002, where he says "not a bad memory for 92". Ted Lewis, his son, firmly said his father was born in 1923 in Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York. Other sources placed his birth in Wolcott, New York, but no official record of his birth has been published to date (2006), and officials in Wolcott say they have no record of any Meister. "The Times" wrote: "Lewis was born Albert Meister, probably in 1923, but he insisted that he was born in 1910. This, and Lewis's many other questionable stories, means that much of the actor's life is a broth of conjecture that his fans will no doubt squabble over for years to come." On his application for a Social Security number, completed sometime between 1936 and 1950, Lewis gave his date of birth as April 30, 1923. The 1940 census lists an Albert Meister "age 16" living on Douglass (today's Strauss) Street in Brooklyn, New York.


title: Al Lewis (actor)

text: In a 1998 interview with Walt Shepperd, Lewis said:My mother was a worker, worked in the garment trades. My mother was an indomitable spirit. My grandfather had no sons. He had six daughters. They lived in Poland or Russia, every five years it would change. My mother being the oldest daughter, they saved their money, and when she was about sixteen they sent her to the United States, not knowing a word of English. She went to work in the garment center, worked her back and rear-end off and brought over to the United States her five sisters and two parents. I remember going on picket lines with my mother. My mother wouldn't back down to anyone.


title: Al Lewis (actor)

text: According to a report in The Jewish Week, Al Lewis attended Yeshiva Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, New York in his youth and "asked annoying questions to the teachers." Lewis then attended Thomas Jefferson High School, which he left in his junior year. He claimed to have attended Oswego State Teachers College (now SUNY Oswego), notwithstanding his lack of a high school diploma, and to have earned a Ph.D. in child psychology from Columbia University in 1941, of which Columbia has no record. Lewis did send at least one of his children to Yeshiva in the San Fernando Valley.


title: Al Lewis (actor)

text: His acting career begins the well-documented portion of his life. He worked in burlesque and vaudeville theaters, then on Broadway in the dramas "The Night Circus" (1958) and "One More River" (1960) and as the character Moe Shtarker in the musical comedy "Do Re Mi" (1962).


title: Al Lewis (actor)

text: His earliest television work includes appearances on the crime drama "Decoy" and "The Phil Silvers Show". From 1959 to 1963, he appeared in four episodes of "Naked City". Lewis's first well-known television role was as Officer Leo Schnauser on the sitcom "Car 54, Where Are You?" from 1961 to 1963, also starring Fred Gwynne (Lewis reprised the role in the 1994 movie of the same name). In the series, Lewis first played Al Spencer the Auto Body Man in two early first-season episodes, then landed the more familiar role of Officer Schnauser. He is best remembered as Grandpa on "The Munsters", which ran on CBS from 1964 to 1966.


title: Al Lewis (actor)

text: In 1967, Lewis played the part of Zalto the magician in the "Lost in Space" episode "Rocket to Earth". His first role in a movie was as Machine Gun Manny in "Pretty Boy Floyd" (1960). He had small roles in "The World of Henry Orient" (1964), "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" (1969), and "They Might Be Giants" (1971). He appeared as Hanging Judge Harrison in "Used Cars" (1980), played a security guard on an episode of "Taxi", and had a minor role in "Married to the Mob" (1988). His last film role was in "Night Terror" (2002).


title: Al Lewis (actor)

text: Lewis was a recurring guest on "The Howard Stern Show". In 1987, during a "Howard Stern Freedom Rally" against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that was broadcast live, Lewis repeatedly shouted "fuck the FCC!" until Stern was able to take the microphone away from him. Stern and the station were not punished for Lewis's comments.


title: Al Lewis (actor)

text: Unlike some actors, Lewis did not mind being typecast. He enjoyed acting out his Grandpa character—in the original costume—and got a surprising amount of mileage from such a short-lived role. "Why not?" he said. "It pays the bills."


title: Al Lewis (actor)

text: In 1991, he appeared as Grandpa in an episode of "Hi Honey, I'm Home" on ABC. In 1991, he appeared in a low-budget movie titled "Grampire" ("My Grandpa Is a Vampire" in the U.S. version), wearing much the same costume as he did in "The Munsters". From 1987 to 1989, Lewis hosted "Super Scary Saturday" on TBS in his Grandpa outfit. This was parodied in "" with the character of Grandpa Fred (Robert Prosky).


title: Al Lewis (actor)

text: Lewis appeared in an episode of "The American Experience" where he recalled his experiences at Coney Island, which he frequently visited and worked at as a game barker. He was featured in the Atari 7800 videogame "Midnight Mutants", an action-adventure title with a Halloween theme. His appearance in the game mirrored his Grandpa persona in "The Munsters".


title: Al Lewis (actor)

text: In 1987, he opened an Italian restaurant named Grampa's Bella Gente at 252 Bleecker Street in Manhattan. In September 1989, he licensed a comedy club named Grampa's to an entrepreneurial family on New Dorp Plaza in Staten Island.


title: Al Lewis (actor)

text: As a left-wing activist, he hosted a politically oriented radio program on WBAI (whose theme song was King Curtis' "Foot Pattin'") and ran as Green Party candidate for governor of New York in 1998. In that race, he sought to be listed on the ballot as Grandpa Al Lewis, arguing that he was most widely known by that name. His request was rejected by the Board of Elections, a decision upheld in court against his challenge.


title: Al Lewis (actor)

text: Despite this setback, he achieved one of his campaign objectives. His total of 52,533 votes exceeded the threshold of votes set by New York law (50,000) and hence guaranteed the Green Party of New York an automatic ballot line for the next four years (see election results, New York governor). He said that, with no political machine and no money backing him, the likelihood of winning the governorship would be "like climbing Mount Everest barefooted". In 2000, he sought the Green Party nomination for US Senate; he ultimately placed second in the primary, with about 32 percent of the vote, losing to Mark Dunau.


title: Al Lewis (actor)

text: Lewis married Marge Domowitz in 1956, with whom he had three sons, Dave, Ted, and Paul. The marriage ended in divorce in 1977. In 1984, he married actress Karen Ingenthron, to whom he remained married for the rest of his life.


title: Al Lewis (actor)

text: In his final years, he resided on Roosevelt Island in New York City. In 2003, he was hospitalized for an angioplasty, and complications from the surgery led to an emergency bypass and the amputation of his right leg below the knee as well as all of the toes on his left foot. He died on February 3, 2006, of natural causes in Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York, NY. The hospital was closed permanently in 2013. Following his body's cremation, his ashes were reportedly "placed in his favorite cigar box."


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: The Hotel Chelsea (also the Chelsea Hotel or the Chelsea) is a hotel in Manhattan, New York City, built between 1883 and 1885. The 250-unit hotel is located at 222 West 23rd Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, in the neighborhood of Chelsea.


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: It has been the home of numerous writers, musicians, artists and actors. Though the Chelsea no longer accepts new long-term residents, the building is still home to many who lived there before the change in policy. Arthur C. Clarke wrote "" while staying at the Chelsea, and poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso chose it as a place for philosophical and artistic exchange. It is also known as the place where the writer Dylan Thomas was staying in room 205 when he became ill and died several days later, in a local hospital, of pneumonia on November 9, 1953, and where Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, was found stabbed to death on October 12, 1978. Arthur Miller wrote a short piece, "The Chelsea Affect", describing life at the Chelsea Hotel in the early 1960s.


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: The building has been a designated New York City landmark since 1966, and on the National Register of Historic Places since 1977.


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: Built between 1883 and 1885 and opened for initial occupation in 1884, the twelve-story red-brick building that is now the Hotel Chelsea was one of the city's first private apartment cooperatives. It was designed by Philip Hubert of the firm of Hubert, Pirrson & Company in a style that has been described variously as Queen Anne Revival and Victorian Gothic. Among its distinctive features are the delicate, flower-ornamented iron balconies on its facade, which were constructed by J.B. and J.M. Cornell and its grand staircase, which extends upward twelve floors. Generally, this staircase is only accessible to registered guests, although the hotel does offer monthly tours to others. At the time of its construction, the building was the tallest in New York.


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: Hubert and Pirsson had created a "Hubert Home Club" in 1880 for "The Rembrandt," a six-story building on West 57th Street intended as housing for artists. This early cooperative building had rental units to help defray costs, and also provided servants as part of the building staff. The success of this model led to other "Hubert Home Clubs," and the Chelsea was one of them. Initially successful, its surrounding neighborhood constituted the center of New York's theater district. However, within a few years the combination of economic stresses, the suspicions of New York's middle class about apartment living, the opening up of Upper Manhattan and the plentiful supply of houses there, and the relocation of the city's theater district bankrupted the Chelsea.


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: The building reopened as a hotel in 1905, which was later managed by Knott Hotels and resident manager A. R. Walty. After the hotel went bankrupt, it was purchased in 1939 by Joseph Gross, Julius Krauss, and David Bard, and these partners managed the hotel together until the early 1970s. Stanley Bard, David Bard's son, became manager after Gross and Krauss' deaths.


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: On June 18, 2007, the hotel's board of directors ousted Bard as the hotel's manager. Dr. Marlene Krauss, the daughter of Julius Krauss, and David Elder, the grandson of Joseph Gross and the son of playwright and screenwriter Lonne Elder III, replaced Stanley Bard with the management company BD Hotels NY; that firm has since been terminated as well.


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: The hotel was sold to real estate developer Joseph Chetrit for $80 million in 2011 and stopped taking reservations for new guests, to begin renovations. Long-time residents were allowed to remain in the building, some of them protected by state rent regulations. The renovations prompted complaints to the city by the remaining tenants of health hazards caused by the construction. The city's Building Department investigated these complaints and found no major violations. In November 2011, the management ordered all of the hotel's many artworks taken off the walls, supposedly for their protection and cataloging, a move which some tenants interpreted as a step towards forcing them out as well. In 2013, Ed Scheetz became the Chelsea Hotel's new owner after buying back five properties from Chetrit and David Bistricer. In 2016, Ira Drukier, Richard Born and Sean MacPherson bought the Chelsea Hotel.


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: Located in the Chelsea since 1930 is the restaurant El Quijote which was owned by the same family until 2017 when it was sold to the new owner of the hotel. In late March 2018 the eatery also closed for renovations.


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: During its lifetime Hotel Chelsea has provided a home to many famous writers and thinkers including Mark Twain, O. Henry, Herbert Huncke, Dylan Thomas, Arthur C. Clarke, Sam Shepard, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac, Brendan Behan, Thomas Wolfe, Valerie Solanas, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Quentin Crisp, Gregory Corso, Arnold Weinstein, Catherine Leroy, and James Schuyler.


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: Delmore Schwartz, author of "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities", spent the last few years of his life in seclusion at the Hotel Chelsea.


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: Charles R. Jackson, author of "The Lost Weekend", died by suicide in his room on September 21, 1968. Joseph O'Neill and his wife moved there in 1998, and they raised three sons there; the Chelsea Hotel plays a significant role in his novel "Netherland".


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: The hotel has been a home to actors, film directors, and comedians such as Ethan Hawke, and Edie Sedgwick.


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: The filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim, who temporarily resided in the hotel, portrayed the artist and long-term resident of the hotel Ching Ho Cheng for his film "Tally Brown, New York".


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: Much of the Hotel Chelsea's history has been colored by the musicians who have resided there. Some of the most prominent names include Chet Baker, Grateful Dead, Nico, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop, Virgil Thomson, Jeff Beck, Bob Dylan, Chick Corea, Alexander Frey, Dee Dee Ramone, Alice Cooper, Édith Piaf, Johnny Thunders, Mink DeVille, Alejandro Escovedo, Marianne Faithfull, Cher, John Cale, Joni Mitchell, Robbie Robertson, Bette Midler, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Canned Heat, J.D. Stooks, Jacques Labouchere, Sid Vicious, Richard Barone, Lance Loud and Rufus Wainwright.


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: Madonna lived at the Chelsea in the early 1980s, returning in 1992 to shoot photographs for her book, "Sex", in room 822. Leonard Cohen, who lived in room 424, and Janis Joplin, in room 411, had an affair there in 1968, and Cohen later wrote two songs about it, "Chelsea Hotel" and "Chelsea Hotel #2". Jobriath spent his last years in the pyramid-topped apartment on the Chelsea's rooftop where he died of complications due to AIDS in August 1983. The Kills wrote much of their album "No Wow" at the Chelsea presumably between the years 2003 to 2005. Jorma Kaukonen wrote the song "Third Week in the Chelsea" for Jefferson Airplane's 1971 album "Bark" after spending three weeks living in the Chelsea.


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: The hotel has featured and collected the work of the many visual artists who have passed through. Frank Bowling, Doris Chase, Bernard Childs, Claudio Edinger, Brett Whiteley, Ching Ho Cheng, Larry Rivers and from 1961 to 1970 several of his French nouveau réalistes friends like Yves Klein (who wrote his "Manifeste de l'hôtel Chelsea" there in April 1961), Arman, Martial Raysse, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, Christo, Daniel Spoerri or Alain Jacquet (who left a version of his "Déjeuner sur l'herbe" from 1964 in the hotel lobby featuring other pieces by Larry Rivers or Arman), Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel, Joe Andoe, David Remfry, Diego Rivera, Ryah Ludins, Robert Crumb, Ellen Cantor, Jasper Johns, Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg, Herbert Gentry, Willem de Kooning, Stella Waitzkin, Robert Mapplethorpe (room 1017, with Patti Smith). The Australian Vali Myers moved into the hotel in 1971 and remained there for 43 years.


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: Charles James, credited with being America's first couturier who influenced fashion in the 1940s and 1950s, moved into the Chelsea in 1964. He died there of pneumonia in 1978. When Billy Reid started his brand in 1998, it was a one-man operation; he lived in the Garment District, while a room at the Chelsea served as an office, studio and showroom. After returning to New York city in 2001 during a sabbatical, Natalie "Alabama" Chanin spent nine months living in the Chelsea Hotel. During her stay, she met many friends, future collaborators, and designed her first collection of 200 upcycled, hand sewn t-shirts, a project that would become Project Alabama and eventually Alabama Chanin. As Chanin's career took off as a pioneer of sustainable design, she continued to show her collections in rooms 409 and 411 at the Chelsea Hotel until 2003.


title: Hotel Chelsea

text: Hotel Chelsea is often associated with the Warhol superstars, as Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey directed "Chelsea Girls" (1966), a film about his Factory regulars and their lives at the hotel.


The 2020 United States presidential election in Arizona was held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, as part of the 2020 United States presidential election, in which all 50 states and the District of Columbia participated. Arizona voters chose 11 electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote pitting incumbent Republican President Donald Trump of Florida and his running mate, incumbent Vice President Mike Pence of Indiana, against Democratic challenger and former Vice President Joe Biden of Delaware and his running mate, United States Senator Kamala Harris of California. The Libertarian nominees were also on the ballot.


title: 2020 United States presidential election in Arizona

text: Trump carried Arizona in 2016 by 3.5%, and it was considered a vital battleground in this election. The state's bitterly competitive nature was attributed to diversification of Maricopa County, a traditionally Republican stronghold that holds 61.6% of the state's population. Maricopa County was seen as vital to either candidate's chances in the state–only one presidential candidate has ever won the state without carrying it. The county is home to Phoenix (the state capital and largest city), Mesa, Chandler, Scottsdale, Glendale, Tempe, and several other major cities. High turnout among Hispanic/Latino and Native American voters was also seen as vital. Polls of the state throughout the campaign generally showed a Biden lead, albeit by a slender margin. Prior to election day, 11 of the 16 news organizations making election predictions considered that Arizona was leaning towards Biden; the other five considered it a toss-up.


text: Biden ultimately won the state by some 10,000 votes over Trump, a 0.3% margin, marking the first time a Democratic presidential nominee carried Arizona since Bill Clinton in 1996, and only the second time since Harry S. Truman's 1948 victory. Arizona was the second-closest state in 2020, the only closer state being Georgia, marking the first time since 1948 that the Democratic nominee won both Sun Belt states in the same presidential election (though Clinton won each state in separate elections). This was also the first time since 1932 that a non-incumbent Democrat carried Arizona in a presidential election, or that an incumbent Republican lost the state. Arizona weighed in as 4.15 percentage points more Republican than the nation in 2020.


text: Per exit polls by the Associated Press, Biden won 59% of Latino voters, including 65% of Latinos of Mexican heritage, who made up the vast majority of the Hispanic electorate. Hispanic and Latino voters comprised 18% of the electorate, up from 15% in 2016 and 16% in 2008. He won 58% of independents and was even able to notch 9% of Republicans and 10% of conservatives. That support allowed Biden to narrowly flip Maricopa County, making him the first Democrat since Truman in 1948 to do so. He held his deficit among suburban voters to 51–48 despite Republicans having won them by double digits in 2016, 2012, and 2008. Biden won college-educated voters 53–46, a 17-point swing from 2016 when Trump won them by 10 percentage points. Additionally, Biden performed relatively well for a Democratic candidate among the state's Latter-day Saint voters, carrying 18% of their vote. Biden had touted his endorsement from Cindy McCain and leaned into his friendship with the late Senator John McCain in advertising. Trump disparaged McCain on several instances at rallies while campaigning and during his presidency, even after McCain's death, which some credited as the finishing blow to his performance among Arizona's moderate voter base.


text: After the election, the Republican-majority Arizona Senate launched a Maricopa County-based publicly-funded investigation into the election fraud alleged by Trump and his supporters. The controversial audit, completed in September 2021, found no evidence to support claims of significant election irregularities, and revealed Biden’s margin of victory in the state to be 360 votes larger than what the initial results indicated.


text: On September 9, 2019, the Arizona Republican Party became one of several state Republican parties to officially cancel their respective primaries and caucuses. Donald Trump's re-election campaign and GOP officials have cited the fact that Republicans canceled several state primaries when George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush sought a second term in 1992 and 2004, respectively; and Democrats scrapped some of their primaries when Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were seeking reelection in 1996 and 2012, respectively.


text: Of the 57 total delegates, 3 were allocated to each of the state's 9 congressional districts, 10 to at-large delegates, and another 3 to pledged party leaders and elected officials (PLEO delegates). 17 bonus delegates were also allocated.


text: The state party still formally conducted the higher meetings in their walking subcaucus-type delegate selection system. The legislative district and county conventions were held from February 8 to April 11 to select delegates to the Arizona State Republican Convention. At the Arizona State Republican Convention, which took place on May 9, the state party formally bound all 57 of its national pledged delegates to Trump. A May 15 email from the Arizona GOP stated that "every one of our ... delegates ... elected pledged to support Donald Trump and Mike Pence as the Republican Party's 2020 nominees for President and Vice President!"


text: The 54 pledged delegates Arizona sent to the national convention were joined by 3 pledged PLEO delegates, consisting of the National Committeeman, National Committeewoman, and chairman of the Arizona Republican Party.


text: The Arizona Democratic primary took place on March 17, 2020, on the same date as the Democratic primaries in Florida and Illinois. Former Vice President Joe Biden won the primary with 43.7% of the vote and 38 delegates, running ahead of Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, who received 32.7% of the vote and 29 delegates. No other candidates received any delegates and the only other candidates to receive more than 1% of the vote were Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts, with 5.8%, and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, with 4.1%. Both Warren and Buttigieg withdrew prior to the contest. The other candidates on the ballot comprised a collective 1.2% of the vote.


text: Biden won 13 of 15 counties in the state of Arizona, with Sanders winning Coconino (home to Flagstaff) and Yuma (home to its eponymous city) counties.


text: The official vote totals reported by the Arizona Secretary of State added up to 86.7%, as the remaining 13.3% of the vote was composed of candidates whose individual vote totals were not reported.


text: Arizona was a heavily contested state throughout the election. Once a reliably Republican state, it has trended more Democratic in recent years, with Trump winning it by just 3.5% in 2016. Compared to past Republicans, Trump's performance was historically weak: Mitt Romney won it with a 9.0% margin in 2012 over Barack Obama, John McCain by 8.5% in 2008 also against Obama, and George W. Bush by 10.5% in 2004 against John Kerry. Arizona was one of just ten states to swing more Democratic in 2016, and its 5.5 percentage point swing was the fourth largest in the country. The swing mirrored a nationwide pattern where suburban voters, formerly the principle Republican voting base, swung deep into the Democratic column. Arizona's leftward swing was also credited to a rapidly growing Hispanic population.


text: The Democratic advantage in the state was pronounced further in the 2018 elections. Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won the open Senate seat against Trump loyalist and Representative Martha McSally by a margin of 55,900 votes (2.4%), flipping the state's Senate seat blue for the first time since 1988. Sinema carried Maricopa County, which holds the majority of Arizona citizens, by 60,256 votes. McSally would later be appointed to Arizona's other Senate seat on January 3, 2019 after the death of John McCain. Democrats also won a 5–4 majority in Arizona's House of Representatives delegation. In the legislative elections, Democrats maintained their deficit in both houses of the Arizona Legislature but picked up four seats in the Arizona House of Representatives and won the general ballot in the Arizona Senate.


text: Trump visited Arizona significantly more than his opponent, holding 4 rallies in just one week, compared to Biden, who only visited the state once. Biden favored small, masked gathering to limit the spread of COVID-19, which ravaged the state's large Navajo communities, whereas Trump favored large rallies with thousands of people in attendance, oftentimes without masks and contrary to the advice of health officials.


text: At his rallies, Trump campaigned with the Republican Governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, as well as Republican Senator Martha McSally, in a bid to help her win reelection against Democrat Mark Kelly in the 2020 United States Senate special election. Ducey suffered from low approval ratings due to his handling of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic – his approval fell from 50% to 29% before the pandemic to a 35–42 deficit in an October 2, 2020 poll. Ducey suffered opposition from both sides of the aisle: he was booed at a Trump rally in Tucson, with Trump supporters shouting "open up and open our state," while facing opposition from the left and public health experts for his failure to promote the usage of masks and other mitigation measures, downplaying the severity of the virus, and prioritization of reopening the economy.


text: According to the Federal Election Commission, in 2019 and 2020, Joe Biden and his interest groups raised $9,284,978.20, Donald Trump and his interest groups raised $15,506,263.10, and Jo Jorgensen raised $29,078.65 from Arizona-based contributors.


text: Independent candidates who wished to run were required to submit a nomination petition and financial disclosure form between 120 and 90 days before the primary election. A valid nomination petition required signatures from 3% of unaffiliated registered voters in Arizona as of March 1, 2020. However, the signatories may be of any political party or unaffiliated as long as they have not already signed a petition for a candidate registered in a political party who intends to run in the same election. Petitions may be physical or electronic; in 2012, Arizona introduced E-Qual, an online nominating petition platform.


text: In-addition, write-in candidates were required to file a nomination paper (including the candidate's name and signature; residence and post office address; age and date of birth; and the length of time the candidate has lived in Arizona) and financial disclosure form by 5:00 p.m. on the 40th day before the election in which the candidate is running – in this case, September 24 – for their votes to be counted. Sore-loser laws prevent candidates who lost a primary election from running in the general election as a write-in candidate. Write-in candidates also may not run if they didn't receive enough signatures to attain ballot access while filing for the primary election or if the candidate did not receive enough signatures to gain ballot access in the general election. The following candidates were given write-in access:


text: Technically the voters of Arizona cast their ballots for electors, or representatives to the Electoral College, rather than directly for president and vice president. Arizona is allocated 11 electors because it has 9 congressional districts and 2 senators. All candidates who appear on the ballot or qualify to receive write-in votes must submit a list of 11 electors who pledge to vote for their candidate and their running mate. Whoever wins the most votes in the state is awarded all 11 electoral votes. Their chosen electors then vote for president and vice president. Although electors are pledged to their candidate and running mate, they are not obligated to vote for them. An elector who votes for someone other than their candidate is known as a faithless elector. In the state of Arizona, a faithless elector's vote is voided and replaced, but the faithless elector is not penalized.


text: The electors of each state and the District of Columbia met on December 15, 2020, to cast their votes for president and vice president. All 11 pledged electors cast their votes for President-elect former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris from California. The Electoral College itself never meets as one body. Instead, the electors from each state and the District of Columbia met in their respective capitols. The electoral vote was tabulated and certified by Congress in a joint session on January 6, 2021 per the Electoral Count Act.


text: These electors were nominated by each party in order to vote in the Electoral College should their candidate win the state:


text: The following are estimates from exit polls conducted by the Edison Research for the National Election Pool (encompassing ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and NBC News) interviewing 1,639 Arizona voters, adjusted to match the actual vote count.


text: The following are estimates from exit polls conducted by the University of Chicago for the Associated Press interviewing 3,772 likely voters in Arizona, adjusted to match the actual vote count.


text: Fox News called Arizona for Biden at 11:20 p.m. EST on November 3, election day, with 73% of projected vote counted. The Associated Press did so at 2:51 a.m. EST on November 4. Fox News received push-back from the Trump campaign as no other network called Arizona on election night. Fox News decision desk director Arnon Mishkin defended the Arizona call at 12:30 a.m., saying that Fox News was "four standard deviations from being wrong" and that Trump was "not going to be able to take over and win enough votes to eliminate that seven-point lead that [Biden] has". Biden and other Democratic candidates began election night with a wide lead in the state, and at the time Fox News called Arizona for Biden, he led by 210,259 votes (53.9% to 44.9%). The reporting in Arizona was the reverse of a 'red mirage' and 'blue shift' effect seen nationwide, where the counting of election day votes before early and absentee votes gave Republicans across the country an early lead. Votes cast on election day typically leaned heavily Republican while those cast early and absentee ballots leaned heavily Democratic, partially due to the skepticism of mail in voting mostly from Trump and fellow Republicans. However, Arizona and several other Sun Belt states had the opposite effect. Early votes and absentee votes cast before the election were pre-counted and released shortly after 10:00 p.m. EST, when polls closed. Election day votes, as well as a few absentee votes, were released on election night and trickled in throughout the rest of the week. "FiveThirtyEight" correctly predicted that close races "might have to wait for those last few ballots before knowing who won". Despite Biden's lead dropping throughout the week, it became clear that Trump's margin among election day votes would not be enough to overtake Biden's lead: Trump needed 59% of the outstanding vote to win, but continuously won around only 53% of the votes released in several ballot dumps after election day.


text: On November 11, "Decision Desk HQ", along with several other outlets, projected that Biden would carry the state. On November 12, ABC News, NBC News, CNN and "The New York Times" all projected Biden to carry the state shortly after 11:00 p.m. Eastern.


text: On January 6, as a joint session of Congress began to certify the election for President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, there was an objection to Arizona's 11 electoral votes, brought forward by Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona's 4th congressional district and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and signed by 67 other senators and representatives. Debates began over the objection in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, but were abruptly cut short after threats by pro-Trump demonstrators that escalated into a full blown storming of the Capitol, forcing the building to be locked down and Congress to be evacuated. After the Capitol was secured at 5:40 p.m. and Congress reconvened, the objection failed 6–93 in the Senate, and 121–303 in the House. The riot reportedly dissuaded several Republican senators and representatives from objecting to the Electoral College results.


text: Following the election, Donald Trump, the Arizona Republican Party, Republican National Committee, and several others filed lawsuits attempting to overturn the results of the election in Arizona, citing unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.


text: On November 7, 2020, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee, and the Arizona Republican Party filed a lawsuit against Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes that alleged that overvotes were "incorrectly rejected". Overvotes occur when a voter mark more than the options allowed in a given race, and stray markings can often be processed as overvotes by tabulation machines. The machines are programmed to alert voters of the overvote, allowing them to either request a new ballot or proceed with the original one. The lawsuit argued that those who chose to file their "original ballots are entitled to a manual inspection of their ballots later," and claimed that voters were urged to cast their original ballots by poll workers rather than request a new one. In total, 4,816 votes were deemed overvotes, which would be insufficient to overcome Biden's 10,457-vote advantage. A representative for Maricopa County stated that only "180 potential overvotes" were involved in the lawsuit, and that it would be "absurd" to assume all 180 were incorrectly counted. The Trump campaign requested that their evidence be kept secret from the public, but the judge refused to allow the secrecy. The Trump campaign also stated that they had video footage from within a polling area; however, such footage would be illegal if taken within 75 feet of a polling area with voters present. Thomas Liddy, a lawyer representing Maricopa County, deemed the lawsuit unnecessary, as if their claims were correct, both Biden and Trump votes would be equally affected, while Roopali Desai, an attorney representing the Secretary of State, argued the lawsuit attempted to "find a problem when one does not exist".


text: Mick West, a skeptical investigator and creator of the website "Metabunk", cited how the percentage of votes deemed overvotes was lower or the same percentage as the last four elections, and a considerable decrease from 2016, when 21,785 overvotes (1.4%) were cast in the presidential election in Maricopa County.


text: On November 10, 2020, Associate Presiding Civil Judge Daniel Kiley accepted a request from Snell & Wilmer, the law firm which was representing the Trump campaign and its allies, to withdraw from the Arizona lawsuit. On November 11, 2020, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich rejected Trump's voter fraud claim during an interview with Fox Business and stated that Biden would win the state of Arizona. On November 13, the Trump campaign dropped their lawsuit after it became evident that the number of votes potentially to be contested would not overcome Biden's margin of victory in the state.


text: Biden became the first Democrat to win Arizona since Bill Clinton in 1996, and only the second since Harry S. Truman in 1948. He is also the first Democrat to win Maricopa County since Truman, with a margin of 2.2%, or 45,109 votes. Arizona had been a Republican stronghold since 1952, even being the only non-Southern state to vote for favorite son Barry Goldwater in Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 landslide. This dominance has been mostly attributable to Maricopa County, which is by far the largest county in Arizona; it has the state capital and largest city, Phoenix, as well as several other major cities including Glendale and Tempe, representing over 61.6% percent of Arizona's population. Though metropolitan centers have long remained Democratic, vast swaths of suburbs, which attracted old Republican voters from the rest of the country after the advent of air conditioning and retirement communities, have kept the state consistently in the Republican column after the New Deal. Any chance Biden had of carrying the state depended on doing reasonably well in Maricopa, which narrowly voted for Trump in 2016, the largest county won by Trump that year. Bill Clinton won Arizona mainly by holding his deficit in Maricopa to single digits, which made him the only candidate to ever win the state without carrying Maricopa. Ultimately, Biden's lead in Maricopa was over four times his statewide margin of 10,457 votes. Biden also became the first Democrat to break 47% of the vote statewide since Lyndon B. Johnson did so in 1964. Biden's statewide winning margin of 0.3% remained out of range for a recount, since Arizona Revised Statutes does not have provisions for candidate- or voter-requested recounts and an automatic recount will only be performed if the margin is lower than 0.1%.


text: The presidential results matched the congressional results, where Democrats held an identical 5–4 majority. Biden flipped the 1st district, which includes Casa Grande, Flagstaff, and Navajo Nation and voted for Donald Trump in 2016 by a 47.7–46.6% margin against Hillary Clinton. Trump easily won the 4th district, which takes in Prescott and most of the rural, northwestern portion of the state. He also carried the 5th, 6th, and 8th districts, all suburban, college-educated districts where Republican dominance has been slipping in recent years. The 6th district, for example, voted for Trump by a mere 4.1%, despite being a Republican stronghold represented by Republicans in the House for all but two years of its history.


text: Along with the 1st district, Biden carried the 7th and 9th districts, both of which encompass liberal bastions of inner Phoenix and parts of the cities of Glendale and Tempe, respectively. The 2nd and 3rd districts, both border districts dominated by Tucson and large Hispanic populations, also voted for Biden.


text: Arizona was seen as a potential Democratic flip throughout the year, as the state's increasing Hispanic population as well as an influx of retirees and younger college-educated voters were becoming increasingly friendly to the Democratic Party. Further signaling the state's blue shift were Arizona's midterm elections, where the Democrats flipped a U.S. Senate seat for the first time since 1988 and won three other statewide races as well as gaining a 5–4 majority in the state's House of Representatives delegation and nearly winning the state legislature. Dilution of the Republican's strength was also seen in local politics, most significantly in Maricopa County, in 2016, when Democrats won two county-wide races for County Recorder and Sheriff. In the latter race, former police sergeant Paul Penzone defeated Republican Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a controversial figure who utilized resources to perpetuate conspiracy theories about Barack Obama's birth certificate and engage in police misconduct, prison overcrowding, racial profiling, and a crackdown on undocumented immigrants. Trump pardoned Arpaio on August 25, 2017, after he failed to obey a court order in a case investigating his department's racial profiling to detain immigrants, drawing negative reactions from public figures and civil rights groups.


text: Exit polls from the Associated Press indicated that Biden carried college-educated white voters 50–48, which make up 28% of Arizona's electorate. He also carried college-educated voters overall by 53–48 and lost suburban voters by 51–48. Suburban backlash against Trump and the Republican Party was indicated as far back as 2016, when Arizona shifted 5.5 percentage points to the left even as 40 other states shifted to the right. Among other states that shifted to the left were California, Georgia, Kansas, Texas, and Virginia, all of which states where the primary Republican voting base laid in the vast suburbs and exurbs outside of major cities. Past Republicans had done very well in the white, heavily educated Phoenix suburbs: Mitt Romney won college-educated voters in Arizona 58–40 in 2012, John McCain by 55–43 in 2008, and George W. Bush by 54–46 in 2004. They also carried suburban voters by roughly twenty points. Perhaps the greatest sign of the suburban revolt was in Arizona's 6th congressional district – the most educated district in Arizona. It has been represented by Republicans for all but two years of its existence, and Bush, Romney, and McCain all won upwards of 60% of the vote in their respective elections. This time around, Trump won it by only four points.


text: Romney, McCain, and Bush were all seen as much more moderate than the Trump wing of the party – several of their former staffers outright endorsed Biden, stating "Given the incumbent president’s lack of competent leadership, his efforts to aggravate rather than bridge divisions among Americans, and his failure to uphold American values, we believe the election of former Vice President Biden is clearly in the national interest." Trump frequently disparaged moderate Republicans, reinvigorating the term RINO ("Republican in name only") to refer to members of the Republican Party who refused to support Trump's efforts to challenge the election results or even Trump's campaign at all. Trump and his family had criticized the moderate wing of the party on several occasions, which was seen as a divide that could prove mortal for the Republican Party in Arizona. On February 29, 2020, Trump called Romney a "low life" for voting to convict Trump of abuse of power in his 2020 impeachment trial, making the Senator the first in history to vote to convict a president of his own party. Romney would later vote to convict him again in 2021 for incitement of insurrection in response to the 2021 United States Capitol attack.


text: Perhaps the most fatal blow to the Trump campaign was his unabashed criticism of the late Senator McCain, who represented Arizona from 1987 to 2018. Several sources told "The Atlantic" that Trump told his aides that McCain was "a fucking loser" in response to McCain receiving half-staff flag honors following his death of brain cancer in 2018. Trump took credit for the Veterans Choice Act on several occasions despite it being championed by McCain and passed in 2014. He previously disparaged McCain on other occasions, stating "I don't like losers" in reference to him losing the 2008 election, "I like people that weren't captured" in reference to his being a prisoner of war in the Vietnam War, and criticizing him on his deciding vote against the American Health Care Act of 2017, a "skinny repeal" of Obamacare. These incidents culminated in Cindy McCain, John McCain's widow, endorsing Biden on September 22, 2020, tweeting that "There's only one candidate in this race who stands up for our values" in reference to the vice president. Democratic advertising often referenced Biden's longtime friendship with McCain in order to appeal to moderate voters.


text: Most analysts referenced Trump's attack on the moderate wing of the Republican Party (especially McCain) as an extreme disadvantage in the state of Arizona which had already been growing more unfavorable for Republicans. An article from Politico argued that the Trump campaign "did more damage to the Republican Party in Arizona than almost anywhere else".


text: Pushing Biden over the edge was the Latino vote, who made up 19% of the electorate, higher than in previous years. Though Democrats have historically won ethnic and racial minorities by large margins, the Arizona Republican Party has had an especially strained relationship with the Latino community going back to 2010 in the wake of the controversial Arizona SB 1070 law, which was seen as, by some, unfairly targeting the Latino community. Historically, Democrats' biggest margins have been in heavily minority counties including two on the southern border, Pima, the second most populous county and home to Tucson, as well as Santa Cruz. A 2020 survey from the Pew Research Center found that the most important issue among Hispanic voters was to "establish [a] way for most immigrants in the U.S. illegally to stay legally," with 54% responding that it was very important and 29% that it was somewhat important. 42% also responded that "improv[ing] security of country's borders" was also a very important issue, and 34% that it was somewhat important. During the campaign, Biden campaigned on ending construction of Trump's Mexican border wall, dramatically increase the refugee cap from Trump's historically low 15,000 cap, and rolling out an easier pathway to citizenship for undocumented and prospective immigrants, including a proposed bill introduced after his inauguration that would unveil up a pathway to citizenship for all 11 million estimated undocumented immigrants. Meanwhile, Trump enacted several immigration restrictions on asylum seekers, refugees, and prospective legal and illegal immigrants, and some pundits credited Trump's victory in 2016 to immigration fearmongering.


text: While Biden did carry the Hispanic/Latino vote by a 59–40 margin, this was eleven points weaker than Hillary Clinton's 61–31 win in 2016 among Latinos, in spite of her loss statewide. Santa Cruz County, where 83.5% of the population is Hispanic or Latino, swung 12 points more Republican than in 2016, while Yuma County (63.8% Hispanic or Latino) swung 5.1 points more Republican. Nonetheless, these swings were cancelled out by a massive increase in turnout and a significant increase in the number of Hispanic voters.


text: An increase in indigenous voting was also considered vital to Biden's victory – turnout in the northeast of the state surged compared to 2016. Biden easily won Apache County, dominated by the Navajo and Fort Apache reservations; and Coconino County, encompassing the Havasupai Nation and parts of the Navajo, Hopi, and Hualapai nations. The Navajo is the largest Native American reservation in the country. Anywhere from 60 to 90% of the Navajo Nation's 67,000 registered voters voted for Biden. In Pima County, Biden won the precincts encompassing the Tohono O'odham, San Xavier, and Pascua Yaqui reservations, often with over 90% of the vote.


text: On the congressional district level, Biden flipped Arizona's 1st congressional district, which Trump won in 2016 by a margin of 3,054 votes, or a 1.1% margin. The district encompasses Casa Grande, Flagstaff, and vast swaths of Native American reservations, most crucially the Navajo Nation, while conservative support has been anchored in whiter rural and exurban regions. AZ-01 has historically supported Republicans in presidential elections (albeit by narrow margins), a trend bucked by Biden who won the district 50.1–48.4%.


text: The presidential election was held concurrently with elections to the House of Representatives and Senate. In the 2020 United States Senate special election, incumbent Republican Martha McSally, who lost the 2018 Senate election but was appointed to the Senate to replace Jon Kyl (who in turn replaced the late John McCain), ran for re-election, but was defeated by Democrat and former astronaut Mark Kelly. Kelly was widely expected in polling and forecasts to outperform Biden due to McSally's unpopularity, and ended up doing so by 2.05 percentage points. It also corresponded with 2020 Arizona Proposition 207, a referendum to approve the legalization and taxation of recreational marijuana, which was approved by over 60% of voters. However, House Democrats underperformed Biden, and Republicans won 50.1% of votes on the general ballot to the Democrats' 49.9%, possibly due to the lack of third-party candidates in all 9 races.


text: By November 7, hand count audits had been completed in Cochrise, Coconino, Grenlee, Maricopa, Mohave, Navajo, Pima, Pinal, Santa Cruz, and Yavapai counties in order to test the accuracy of the voting tabulation equipment. Each of these county hand count audits either found there to be no discrepancies, or found their count to be within the acceptable margins of error identified by state election law.


text: While Maricopa County's November 4 hand count audit had found no discrepancies, an additional physical hand recount of 47,000 ballots (2% of election-day ballots plus 5,000 early voting ballots) was conducted in Maricopa County from November 7 through November 9, 2020, which again found no discrepancies.


text: On January 24, 2021, the Arizona GOP voted to censure Cindy McCain, Jeff Flake, and Doug Ducey, all of whom vehemently denied conspiracy theories from the Trump campaign arguing that the results in Arizona were fraudulent and invalid. Between January 6 and January 20, the Arizona Secretary of State office reported that over 8,000 Republicans changed their party registration to Democrat, Libertarian, or unaffiliated, which was attributed to said actions by Trump and the Arizona GOP.


text: On February 23, 2021, Maricopa County announced that forensic audits of their vote tabulation equipment by two independent auditors had found no irregularities.


text: On March 31, 2021, the Arizona Senate Republican caucus hired four firms to examine the ballots in Maricopa County in the races for President and for the United States Senate, with a Florida-based company called Cyber Ninjas being the lead firm. Cyber Ninjas' owner, Doug Logan, is a Trump supporter and a proponent of Trump's false claims of voter fraud. The process involves an audit to search for evidence of fraud, and a hand recount of the 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County. The hand recount is managed by Wake Technology Services, which reportedly had been hired for a previous audit in a rural Pennsylvania county by Trump attorney Sidney Powell, who has promoted numerous conspiracy theories about the election; the firm works primarily in the healthcare sector with little to no experience with elections.


text: The Arizona Republicans funded the effort by using $150,000 from the State Senate operating budget, but this money is acknowledged to be insufficient and the actual source of funding has not been declared. Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com and promoter of 2020 election conspiracy theories, donated one million dollars to the effort and created a website to raise further funds, which was promoted by former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn. The fundraising was conducted through a 501(c)(4) organization, a tax code provision intended primarily for the promotion of social welfare. One America News personalities also created a dark money organization to raise funds, while providing extensive coverage of the audit that drew praise from Trump." CueCat" inventor J. Hutton Pulitzer claims to have invented a system for detecting "kinematic markers" which is being used by Cyber Ninjas. Pulitzer is also said to be the originator of the claim that Chinese ballots with paper containing bamboo are part of the claimed fraud. Flynn and Byrne stated that, if they were proven wrong, the would publicly apologize that they "put this country through this."


text: The audit began on April 22, and on the same day Arizona Senate Democrats filed a lawsuit to stop the audit. The next day Judge Christopher Coury agreed to suspend the audit for three days until the contractors can present documentation on how they will conduct the audit. The suspension was conditioned on the Arizona Senate Democrats posting a $1 million bond to cover the cost that the delay could cost the Arizona State Senate Republicans. But because the Arizona State Senate Democrats refused to post the bond, the suspension did not go into effect. By May 5 Arizona Senate Democrats reached a settlement with the Arizona Senate Republicans to allow independent elections experts to observe the audit. The agreement authorizes Secretary of State Katie Hobbs to file suit against Cyber Ninjas for breach of contract if the company does not live up to the agreement.


text: Former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, a Republican, had been designated as the State Senate's liaison to the audit. On May 5, 2021, Hobbs sent a letter to Bennett, detailing additional concerns with the way the audit was being conducted. Her letter cited the audit's disclosed procedures (departures from best practices for hand recounts) and the reports of the observers sent from the Secretary of State's office (including sloppy handling of ballots). A response from the audit's Twitter account asserted that Hobbs’s allegations were "baseless claimes [sic]".


text: Also on May 5, the United States Department of Justice sent Karen Fann, president of the Arizona State Senate, a letter expressing concerns that the audit may violate federal laws. One concern is that the law requires election officials to maintain custody of all voting records for up to 22 months. Another concern is that the statement of work for Cyber Ninjas authorizes Cyber Ninjas to knock on voters' doors to ask them if they have voted in the 2020 elections, which may amount to voter intimidation and constitute a violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. After the Department of Justice threatened to sue over this plan, Cyber Ninjas agreed not to do it.


text: As part of the audit, auditors have been looking for secret watermarks, machine-markings, and bamboo fibers within the ballots. The testing for bamboo fibers was intended to prove a conspiracy theory that counterfeit ballots were shipped from South Korea after the elections. The audit was supposed to have concluded on May 14, but as of May 9, only 12% of the ballots were counted. The audit is being conducted at the main floor of the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum, which was not available for this activity beyond the original target date. Consequently, the audit went on hiatus on May 14 and resumed on May 24.


text: The objectivity of the audit has been called into question due to the involvement of Logan. Additionally, Anthony Kern, a former Republican state lawmaker who was present at the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol, has been seen tallying votes. Kern, who was himself named on the ballots as a would-be Trump presidential elector as well as running for re-election to the Arizona House of Representatives, has since been removed from the group with access to the ballots. Former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, a Republican, is advising the audit. Hobbs, the current Secretary of State, has criticized Bennett's efforts, saying he needs to "either do it right, or don't do it at all."


text: The audit has produced division among Arizona Republicans. After initially supporting the audit, on May 9 Paul Boyer, a member of the Arizona State Senate Republican caucus, criticized the audit, saying "it makes us look like idiots." The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which is dominated by Republicans, also opposed the audit. On May 17, the board held a hearing and sent Fann a twelve-page letter to dispute her allegations of wrongdoing by county officials. Republican board chairman Jack Sellers stated that the allegations were actually due to the incompetence of the auditors and accused Fann of an "attempt at legitimatizing a grift disguised as an audit." Fann, however, continued to support the audit, and sent the Board of Supervisors a four-page letter stating that "serious issues" had arisen during the audit. Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward released multiple videos about the audit, in which she criticized the Board of Supervisors and raised "the possibility of placing the validity of the entire 2020 election into question." A poll conducted at the end of March found that 78.3% of Arizona Republicans believed "that there was significant voter fraud in the 2020 United States Presidential Election which compromised the integrity of the election."


text: Fann made an allegation, later amplified by Trump in a May 15 post on his blog, asserting that Maricopa County election officials deleted the voting database after the election. Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican who oversees elections, tweeted that Trump's post was "unhinged", noting he was looking at the database on his computer at that moment. Richer added, "We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer." The auditors later acknowledged the database had not been deleted.


text: "The Arizona Republic" reported in May that because Senate Republicans had given private companies and individuals unfettered and unmonitored access to voting machines, the county might need to expend significant funds and time to ensure the equipment would meet federal, state and local requirements for certifying and protecting election equipment. "The Republic" reported the voting machines were worth $6 million. Hobbs, the Secretary of State, later informed the Board of Supervisors that election technology and security experts, including at the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, unanimously advised her that the machines should not be reused in future elections because no methods exist to adequately secure them.


text: A preliminary report on the results of the audit, made at the cost of some six million dollars raised from Trump supporters determined to overturn the election, found no evidence of fraud. Despite that, Trump continued to claim that there had been fraud in the tabulation of results and confirmation of the Biden win. The audit claimed to have found minor discrepancies in the original, state-certified count, that had actually widened Biden's margin by 360 votes.


title: Rigoletto

text: Rigoletto is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi. The Italian libretto was written by Francesco Maria Piave based on the 1832 play "Le roi s'amuse" by Victor Hugo. Despite serious initial problems with the Austrian censors who had control over northern Italian theatres at the time, the opera had a triumphant premiere at La Fenice in Venice on 11 March 1851.


title: Rigoletto

text: The work, Verdi's sixteenth in the genre, is widely considered to be the first of the operatic masterpieces of Verdi's middle-to-late career. Its tragic story revolves around the licentious Duke of Mantua, his hunch-backed court jester Rigoletto, and Rigoletto's daughter Gilda. The opera's original title, "La maledizione" (The Curse), refers to a curse placed on both the Duke and Rigoletto by a courtier whose daughter the Duke has seduced with Rigoletto's encouragement. The curse comes to fruition when Gilda falls in love with the Duke and sacrifices her life to save him from the assassin hired by her father.


title: Rigoletto

text: La Fenice of Venice commissioned Verdi in 1850 to compose a new opera. He was prominent enough by this time to enjoy some freedom in choosing texts to set to music. He initially asked Francesco Maria Piave (with whom he had already created "Ernani", "I due Foscari", "Macbeth", "Il corsaro" and "Stiffelio") to examine the play "Kean" by Alexandre Dumas, père, but soon came to believe that they needed to find a more energetic subject.


title: Rigoletto

text: That came in the form of Victor Hugo's controversial five-act play "Le roi s'amuse" ("The king amuses himself"). Verdi later explained that "The subject is grand, immense, and there is a character that is one of the greatest creations that the theatre can boast of, in any country and in all history." However, Hugo's depiction of a venal, cynical, womanizing king (Francis I of France) was considered unacceptably scandalous. The play had been banned in France following its premiere nearly twenty years earlier (not to be staged again until 1882); now it was to come before the Austrian Board of Censors (as Austria at that time directly controlled much of Northern Italy.)


title: Rigoletto

text: From the beginning, both composer and librettist knew this step would not be easy. As Verdi wrote in a letter to Piave: "Use four legs, run through the town and find me an influential person who can obtain the permission for making "Le Roi s'amuse"." Guglielmo Brenna, secretary of La Fenice, promised the duo that they would not have problems with the censors. He was wrong, and rumours began to spread in early summer that the production would be forbidden. In August, Verdi and Piave retired to Busseto, Verdi's hometown, to prepare a defensive scheme as they continued work on the opera. Despite their best efforts, including frantic correspondence with La Fenice, the Austrian censor De Gorzkowski emphatically denied consent to the production of "La Maledizione" (its working title) in a December 1850 letter, calling the opera "a repugnant [example of] immorality and obscene triviality."


title: Rigoletto

text: Piave set to work revising the libretto, eventually pulling from it another opera, "Il Duca di Vendome", in which the sovereign was a duke and both the hunchback and the curse disappeared. Verdi was completely against this proposed solution, preferring to negotiate directly with the censors over each and every point of the work. Brenna, La Fenice's sympathetic secretary, mediated the dispute by showing the Austrians some letters and articles depicting the bad character, but great value, of the artist. By January 1851 the parties had settled on a compromise: the action of the opera would be moved, and some of the characters would be renamed. In the new version, the Duke would preside over Mantua and belong to the Gonzaga family. (The House of Gonzaga had long been extinct by the mid-19th century, and the Dukedom of Mantua no longer existed.) The scene in which he retired to Gilda's bedroom would be deleted, and his visit to the "Taverna" (inn) would no longer be intentional, but the result of a trick. The hunchbacked jester (originally called Triboulet) was renamed Rigoletto (from the French word "rigoler") from a parody of a comedy by Jules-Édouard Alboize de Pujol: "Rigoletti, ou Le dernier des fous" (Rigoletti, or The last of the fools) of 1835. By 14 January, the opera's definitive title had become "Rigoletto".


title: Rigoletto

text: Verdi finally completed the composition on 5 February 1851, a little more than a month before the premiere. Piave had already arranged for the sets to be designed while Verdi was still working on the final stages of act 3. The singers were given some of their music to learn on 7 February. However, Verdi kept at least a third of the score at Busseto. He brought it with him when he arrived in Venice for the rehearsals on 19 February, and would continue refining the orchestration throughout the rehearsal period. For the première, La Fenice had cast Felice Varesi as Rigoletto, the tenor Raffaele Mirate as the Duke, and Teresa Brambilla as Gilda (although Verdi would have preferred Teresa De Giuli Borsi). Due to a high risk of unauthorised copying, Verdi demanded extreme secrecy from all his singers and musicians, particularly Mirate: the "Duke" had the use of his score for only a few evenings before the première, and was made to swear that he would not sing or even whistle the tune of "La donna è mobile" except during rehearsal.


title: Rigoletto

text: "Rigoletto" premiered on 11 March 1851 in a sold-out La Fenice as the first part of a double bill with Giacomo Panizza's ballet "Faust". Gaetano Mares conducted, and the sets were designed and executed by Giuseppe Bertoja and Francesco Bagnara. The opening night was a complete triumph, especially the "scena drammatica" and the Duke's cynical aria, "La donna è mobile", which was sung in the streets the next morning (Verdi had maximised the aria's impact by only revealing it to the cast and orchestra a few hours before the premiere, and forbidding them to sing, whistle or even think of the melody outside of the theatre). Many years later, Giulia Cora Varesi, the daughter of Felice Varesi (the original Rigoletto), described her father's performance at the premiere. Varesi was very uncomfortable with the false hump he had to wear; he was so uncertain that, even though he was quite an experienced singer, he had a panic attack when it was his turn to enter the stage. Verdi immediately realised he was paralysed and roughly pushed him on the stage, so he appeared with a clumsy tumble. The audience, thinking it was an intentional gag, was very amused.


title: Rigoletto

text: "Rigoletto" was a great box-office success for La Fenice and Verdi's first major Italian triumph since the 1847 premiere of "Macbeth" in Florence. It initially had a run of 13 performances and was revived in Venice the following year, and again in 1854. Despite a rather disastrous production in Bergamo shortly after its initial run at La Fenice, the opera soon entered the repertory of Italian theatres. By 1852, it had premiered in all the major cities of Italy, although sometimes under different titles due to the vagaries of censorship (e.g. as "Viscardello", "Lionello", and "Clara de Perth"). From 1852, it also began to be performed in major cities worldwide, reaching as far afield as Alexandria and Constantinople in 1854 and both Montevideo and Havana in 1855. The UK premiere took place on 14 May 1853 at what is now the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in London with Giovanni Matteo Mario as the Duke of Mantua and Giorgio Ronconi as Rigoletto. In the US, the opera was first seen on 19 February 1855 at New York's Academy of Music in a performance by the Max Maretzek Italian Opera Company.


title: Rigoletto

text: Several modern productions have radically changed the original setting. These include Jonathan Miller's 1982 production for the English National Opera, which is set amongst the Mafia in New York City's Little Italy during the 1950s; Doris Dörrie's 2005 production for the Bavarian State Opera, where the Court of Mantua became The Planet of the Apes; director Linda Brovsky's production for Seattle Opera, placing the story in Mussolini's fascist Italy, in 2004 (repeated in 2014); and Michael Mayer's 2013 production for the Metropolitan Opera, which is set in a casino in 1960s Las Vegas. Different characters portray different archetypes from the Rat Pack era, with the Duke becoming a Frank Sinatra-type character and Rigoletto becoming Don Rickles. In March 2014, Lindy Hume, artistic director of Australia's Opera Queensland staged the opera set in the party-going world of disgraced former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.


title: Rigoletto

text: "Scene 1: Mantua. A magnificent hall in the ducal palace. Doors at the back open into other rooms, splendidly lit up. A crowd of lords and ladies in grand costumes are seen walking about in the rear rooms; page boys come and go. The festivities are at their height. Music is heard from offstage. The Duke and Borsa enter from a door in the back."


title: Rigoletto

text: At a ball in his palace, the Duke sings of a life of pleasure with as many women as possible, and mentions that he particularly enjoys cuckolding his courtiers: ""Questa o quella"" ("This woman or that"). He mentions to Borsa that he has seen an unknown beauty in church and desires to possess her, but he also wishes to seduce the Countess of Ceprano. Rigoletto, the Duke's hunchbacked court jester, mocks the husbands of the ladies to whom the Duke is paying attention, including the Count Ceprano. He humorously advises the Duke to get rid of Count Ceprano by prison, exile, or death. The Duke laughs indulgently, but Ceprano is not amused. Marullo, one of the guests at the ball, informs the courtiers that Rigoletto has a "lover", which astonishes them. (Marullo is not aware that the "lover" is actually Rigoletto's daughter.) The courtiers, at Ceprano's suggestion, resolve to take vengeance on Rigoletto for making fun of them. The festivities are interrupted by the arrival of the elderly Count Monterone, whose daughter the Duke had seduced. Rigoletto provokes him further by making fun of his helplessness to avenge his daughter's honor. Monterone confronts the Duke, and is immediately arrested by the Duke's guards. Before being led off to prison, Monterone curses both the Duke for the attack on his daughter and Rigoletto for having mocked his righteous anger. The curse terrifies Rigoletto, who believes the popular superstition that an old man's curse has real power.


title: Rigoletto

text: "Scene 2: The end of a dead-end street. On the left, a house of discreet appearance with one small courtyard surrounded by walls. In the yard there is one tall tree and a marble seat; in the wall, a door that leads to the street; above the wall, a terrace supported by arches. The second floor door opens on to the said terrace, which can also be reached by a staircase in front. To the right of the street is the very high wall of the garden and a side of the Ceprano palace. It is night."


title: Rigoletto

text: Preoccupied with the old man's curse, Rigoletto approaches the house where he is concealing his daughter from the world and is accosted by the assassin Sparafucile, who walks up to him and offers his services. Rigoletto declines for the moment, but leaves open the possibility of hiring Sparafucile later, should the need arise. Sparafucile wanders off, after repeating his own name a few times. Rigoletto contemplates the similarities between the two of them: "Pari siamo!" ("We are alike!"); Sparafucile kills men with his sword, and Rigoletto uses "a tongue of malice" to stab his victims. Rigoletto opens a door in the wall and embraces his daughter Gilda. They greet each other warmly: "Figlia!" "Mio padre!" ("Daughter!" "My father!"). Rigoletto has been concealing his daughter from the Duke and the rest of the city, and she does not know her father's occupation. Since he has forbidden her to appear in public, she has been nowhere except to church and does not even know her own father's name.


title: Rigoletto

text: When Rigoletto has gone, the Duke appears and overhears Gilda confess to her nurse Giovanna that she feels guilty for not having told her father about a young man she had met at the church. She says that she fell in love with him, but that she would love him even more if he were a student and poor. As she declares her love, the Duke enters, overjoyed. Gilda, alarmed, calls for Giovanna, unaware that the Duke had given her money to go away. Pretending to be a student, the Duke convinces Gilda of his love: "È il sol dell'anima" ("Love is the sunshine of the soul"). When she asks for his name, he hesitantly calls himself Gualtier Maldè. Hearing sounds and fearing that her father has returned, Gilda sends the Duke away after they quickly trade vows of love: "Addio, addio" ("Farewell, farewell"). Alone, Gilda meditates on her love for the Duke, who she believes is a student: "Gualtier Maldè!... Caro nome che il mio cor" ("Dearest name").


title: Rigoletto

text: Later, Rigoletto returns: "Riedo!... perché?" ("I've returned!... why?"), while the hostile courtiers outside the walled garden (believing Gilda to be the jester's mistress, unaware she is his daughter) get ready to abduct the helpless girl. They tell Rigoletto that they are actually abducting the Countess Ceprano. He sees that they are masked and asks for a mask for himself; while they are tying the mask onto his face, they also blindfold him. Blindfolded and deceived, he holds the ladder steady while they climb up to Gilda's room: Chorus: "Zitti, zitti" ("Softly, softly"). With her father's unknowing assistance Gilda is carried away by the courtiers. Left alone, Rigoletto removes his mask and blindfold, and realizes that it was in fact Gilda who was carried away. He collapses in despair, remembering the old man's curse.


title: Rigoletto

text: "A room in the ducal palace. There are doors on both sides as well as a larger one at the far end by the sides of which hang full length portraits of the Duke and his wife. There is one high-backed chair at a table covered with velvet and other furnishings."


title: Rigoletto

text: The Duke is concerned that Gilda has disappeared: "Ella mi fu rapita!" ("She was stolen from me!") and "Parmi veder le lagrime" ("I seem to see tears"). The courtiers then enter and inform him that they have captured Rigoletto's mistress: Chorus: "Scorrendo uniti" ("We went together at nightfall"). By their description, he recognizes it to be Gilda and rushes off to the room where she is held: "Possente amor mi chiama" ("Mighty love beckons me"). Rigoletto enters singing and feigning nonchalance, but also looking anxiously for any trace of Gilda, who he fears may have fallen into the hands of the Duke. The courtiers pretend not to notice his anxiety, but quietly laugh at him with each other. A page boy arrives with a message from the Duke's wife – the Duchess wishes to speak to her husband – but the courtiers reply suggestively that the Duke cannot be disturbed at the moment. Rigoletto realizes this must mean that Gilda is with the Duke. To the courtiers' surprise, he reveals that Gilda is his daughter. He first demands, then tearfully pleads with the courtiers to return her to him: "Cortigiani, vil razza dannata" ("Accursed race of courtiers"). Rigoletto attempts to run into the room in which Gilda is being held, but the courtiers block his way. After a time, Gilda enters, and Rigoletto orders the courtiers to leave him alone with her. The courtiers leave the room, believing Rigoletto has gone mad. Gilda describes to her father what has happened to her in the palace: "Tutte le feste al tempio" ("On all the holy days") and he attempts to console her. Monterone is led across the room on the way to prison and pauses in front of the portrait of the Duke to regret that his curse on the libertine has had no effect. As the guards lead Monterone away, Rigoletto mutters that the old man is mistaken; he, Rigoletto, the dishonored buffoon, shall make thunder and lightning rain from heaven onto the offender's head. He repeats this vow as Gilda pleads for mercy for her lover the Duke: Duet:"Sì! Vendetta, tremenda vendetta!" ("Yes! Revenge, terrible revenge!").


title: Rigoletto

text: "The right bank of the river Mincio. On the left is a two-story house, half ruined. Through a large arch on the ground floor a rustic tavern can be seen as well as a rough stone staircase that leads to an attic room with a small bed which is in full view as there are no shutters. In the wall downstairs that faces the street is a door that opens to the inside. The wall is so full of holes and cracks that everything that happens inside is easily seen from the exterior. At the back of the stage are deserted areas by the river which flows behind a parapet that has half collapsed into ruins. Beyond the river is Mantua. It is night. Gilda and Rigoletto, both uneasy, are standing in the road; Sparafucile is seated at a table in the tavern."


title: Rigoletto

text: A portion of Sparafucile's house is seen, with two rooms open to the view of the audience. Rigoletto and Gilda arrive outside. The Duke's voice can be heard from inside, singing "La donna è mobile" ("Woman is fickle"). Sparafucile's sister, Maddalena, has lured him to the house. Rigoletto and Gilda listen from outside as the Duke flirts with Maddalena. Gilda laments that the Duke is unfaithful; Rigoletto assures her that he is arranging revenge: "Bella figlia dell'amore" ("Beautiful daughter of love").


title: Rigoletto

text: Rigoletto orders Gilda to put on a man's clothes to prepare to leave for Verona and tells her that he plans to follow later. After she leaves, he completes his bargain with the assassin, who is ready to murder his guest for 20 scudi. Rigoletto then withdraws.


title: Rigoletto

text: With falling darkness, a thunderstorm approaches and the Duke decides to spend the rest of the night in the house. Sparafucile directs him to the upstairs sleeping quarters, resolving to kill him in his sleep.


title: Rigoletto

text: Gilda, who still loves the Duke despite knowing him to be unfaithful, returns dressed as a man and stands outside the house. Maddalena, who is smitten with the Duke, begs Sparafucile to spare his life: "È amabile invero cotal giovinotto/ Ah, più non ragiono!". Sparafucile, a man of his word, is reluctant but promises her that if by midnight another victim can be found, he will kill the other instead of the Duke. Gilda, overhearing this exchange, resolves to sacrifice herself for the Duke, and enters the house: "Trio: Se pria ch'abbia il mezzo la notte toccato". Sparafucile stabs her and she collapses, mortally wounded.


title: Rigoletto

text: At midnight, when Rigoletto arrives with money, he receives a corpse wrapped in a sack, and rejoices in his triumph. Weighting it with stones, he is about to cast the sack into the river when he hears the voice of the Duke, sleepily singing a reprise of his "La donna è mobile" aria. Bewildered, Rigoletto opens the sack and, to his despair, discovers his dying daughter. For a moment, she revives and declares she is glad to die for her beloved: "V'ho ingannato" ("Father, I deceived you"). She dies in his arms. Rigoletto cries out in horror: "La maledizione!" ("The curse!")


title: Rigoletto

text: The orchestra calls for 2 flutes (Flute 2 doubles piccolo), 2 oboes (Oboe 2 doubles English horn), 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns in Eb, D, C, Ab, G, and F, 2 trumpets in C, D, and Eb, 3 trombones, cimbasso, timpani, bass drum and cymbals, strings.


title: Rigoletto

text: The short orchestral preludio is based on the theme of the curse, intoned quietly on brass at first and building in intensity until it bursts into a passionate outcry by the full orchestra, subsiding once more and ending with repeated drum rolls alternating with brass, cumulatively increasing in volume to come to a somber conclusion. At curtain rise, great contrast is immediately felt as jolly dance music is played by an offstage band while the Duke and his courtiers have a lighthearted conversation. The Duke sings the cynical "Questa o quella" to a flippant tune and then further contrast is again achieved as he attempts to seduce the Countess Ceprano while the strings of a chamber orchestra onstage play an elegant minuet. The off stage dance music resumes as an ensemble builds between Rigoletto, the angry courtiers and the Duke, interrupted by the furious entry of Monterone. Slithery effects in the strings accompany Rigoletto as he brutally mocks the old man, who responds with his curse, leading to a final dramatic ensemble.


title: Rigoletto

text: In its great variety of tone and texture, its use of instrumental resources (the orchestra in the pit, an offstage band, and a chamber ensemble of strings on the stage), its dramatic pacing and the way the music is continuous rather than consisting of one "number" after another, this concise opening scene is unprecedented in Italian opera.


title: Rigoletto

text: The duet between Rigoletto and Sparafucile that opens the second scene of the first act is also unprecedented in its structure, being a free-ranging dialogue with melodies not in the voices but in the orchestra, on a solo cello, solo bass, and low woodwinds to create a distinctive sinister atmosphere.


title: Rigoletto

text: The famous quartet in act three is actually a double duet with each of the characters given a musical identity—the ardent wooing of the Duke, with the main melody, as Maddalena laughingly puts him off, while outside Gilda has a sobbing figure in her vocal line and her father implacably urges revenge. Victor Hugo resented his play, which had been banned in France, being transformed into an Italian opera and considered it plagiarism (there were no copyright restrictions against this at the time). When Hugo attended a performance of the opera in Paris, however, he marveled at the way Verdi's music in the quartet allowed the emotions of the four different characters to be heard together and yet distinguished clearly from each other at the same time and wished that he could achieve such an effect in a spoken drama.


title: Rigoletto

text: The section following the quartet, marked "Scena e Terzetto Tempesta" (scene and storm trio) is also, as Julian Budden has written,"without any antecedent". Very different from the storm music that can be heard in Rossini's "Il barbiere di Siviglia" or "La Cenerentola", that of the storm in "Rigoletto" is not an interlude between acts or scenes, but is totally integrated into the unfolding of the plot, with its strings in the bass register, its interventions of oboe and piccolo, and especially the male chorus behind the scenes humming through closed mouths to create the sound of the wind, a completely original effect. Composer and professor of experimental music Dieter Schnebel (1930–2018) wrote of this scene


title: Rigoletto

text: The central storm scene is, so to speak, a film with sound, whose moving images show an exterior and interior drama. The furtive encounters between people in the darkness, irregularly broken by lightning, are exposed by the empty fifths, the tremolos of strings, the brief breakthroughs of the wind instruments, the thunderclaps and the sinister sighs of the chorus, which express as well an external process that is internal: death arrives with thunderclaps. The music always passes in this scene from jerky recitatives to fluid arias...


title: Rigoletto

text: Musicologist Julian Budden regards the opera as "revolutionary", just as Beethoven' "Eroica" Symphony was: "the barriers between formal melody and recitative are down as never before. In the whole opera, there is only one conventional double aria [...and there are...] no concerted act finales." Verdi used that same word—"revolutionary"—in a letter to Piave, and Budden also refers to a letter which Verdi wrote in 1852 in which the composer states that "I conceived "Rigoletto" almost without arias, without finales but only an unending string of duets."


title: Rigoletto

text: Just after 1850 at the age of 38 Verdi closed the door on a period of Italian opera with "Rigoletto". The so-called "ottocento" in music is finished. Verdi will continue to draw on certain of its forms for the next few operas, but in a totally new spirit.


title: Rigoletto

text: Although immensely successful with audiences from the beginning, many critics in various countries condemned the work for its dark and bitterly tragic plot combined with a succession of mere popular tunes, as they thought of the music. After the first performance in Venice in 1851 the "Gazzetta ufficiale di Venezia" deplored the fact that in his opinion the libretto was inspired by "the Satanic school" and Verdi and Piave had sought beauty from the "deformed and repulsive".


title: Rigoletto

text: Typical of critical reaction in Britain, Austria and Germany was the review in the "Frankfurter Nachrichten" of July 24, 1859: "It is well known that this shoddy work presents all the vices and virtues of Verdi's music: light music, pleasant dance rhythms for frightful scenes; that death and corruption are represented as in all the works of this composer by galops and party favours."


title: Rigoletto

text: In the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, "Rigoletto" has received high praise even from avant-garde and experimental composers such as Luigi Dallapiccola, Luciano Berio and Ernst Krenek. Igor Stravinsky wrote "I say that in the aria 'La donna è mobile', for example, which the elite thinks only brilliant and superficial, there is more substance and feeling than in the whole of Wagner's "Ring" cycle."


title: Rigoletto

text: There have been dozens of commercial recordings of "Rigoletto". The earliest ones include the 1912 performance in French with François Ruhlmann conducting the orchestra and chorus of the Opéra Comique (Pathé) and the 1916 performance in Italian with Lorenzo Molajoli conducting the orchestra and chorus of La Scala (Columbia Records). The first LP edition of "Rigoletto" (also the very first opera recording on LP) was released by RCA Victor in 1950 conducted by Renato Cellini and featured Leonard Warren in the title role. The opera has also been recorded in German with Wilhelm Schüchter conducting the orchestra and chorus of the Berlin State Opera in a 1953 recording for EMI Records and in English with Mark Elder conducting the orchestra and chorus of the English National Opera in a 1983 recording for EMI. In the 21st century there have been several live performances released on DVD including a 2001 performance from London's Royal Opera House with Paolo Gavanelli as Rigoletto and Marcelo Álvarez as the Duke (BBC/Opus Arte) and a 2006 performance at the Opernhaus Zürich with Leo Nucci as Rigoletto and Piotr Beczała as The Duke (ArtHaus Musik). The Duke of Mantua's arias, particularly "La donna è mobile" and "Questa o quella", have long been showcases for the tenor voice and appear on numerous recital discs. Amongst Enrico Caruso's earliest recordings are both these arias, recorded with piano accompaniment in 1902 and again in 1908 with orchestra. Luciano Pavarotti, who has recorded the arias for several recital discs, also sings the role of the Duke on three complete studio recordings of the opera: Decca (1971) conducted by Richard Bonynge; Decca (1989) conducted by Riccardo Chailly and Deutsche Grammophon (1993) conducted by James Levine.


title: Rigoletto

text: "Rigoletto" has been a popular subject for movies since the silent film era. On 15 April 1923, Lee de Forest presented 18 short films in his sound-on-film process Phonofilm, including an excerpt of act 2 of "Rigoletto" with Eva Leoni and Company. One of the most famous films based on the opera is the 1987 film by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle starring Luciano Pavarotti as The Duke and Ingvar Wixell as Rigoletto. Some film versions are based on the opera's plot, but do not use Verdi's music. Curtiss Clayton's 2003 film "Rick", set in modern-day New York, has a plot based on "Rigoletto", but apart from "La donna è mobile" heard in the background during a restaurant scene, does not include any other music from the opera. In the 21st century, the opera was filmed as "Rigoletto Story" directed by Vittorio Sgarbi with costumes by Vivienne Westwood. First screened at the Venice Biennale in 2004, it subsequently received two Grammy nominations. In September 2010, RAI Television filmed the opera on location in Mantua with the court scenes taking place in the Palazzo Te. The film faithfully followed Verdi's original specification for the action to take place over two days, and each act was performed at the time of day indicated in the libretto. Broadcast live to 148 countries, the film starred Plácido Domingo in the title role, and Vittorio Grigolo as The Duke. The plot of the film "Quartet" revolves around the quartet "Bella figlia dell'amore", with which the film concludes.


title: Rigoletto

text: Adaptations of the opera's music include Franz Liszt's "Rigoletto Paraphrase", a piano transcription of "Bella figlia dell'amore" (the famous quartet from act 3) and a Fantasia on "Rigoletto" (Op.82) by Sigismond Thalberg which was published in Paris in the 1860s.


title: Blame!

text: Blame! (stylized as BLAME!) is a Japanese science fiction manga series written and illustrated by Tsutomu Nihei. It was published by Kodansha in the "seinen" manga magazine "Monthly Afternoon" from 1997 to 2003, with its chapters collected in ten "tankōbon" volumes. A six-part original net animation was produced in 2003, with a seventh episode included on the DVD release. An anime film adaptation by Polygon Pictures was released as a Netflix original in May 2017.


title: Blame!

text: "Blame!" is set in what is simply known as "The City", a gigantic megastructure now occupying much of what used to be the Solar System. Its exact size is unknown, but Tsutomu Nihei suggested its diameter to be at least that of Jupiter's orbit, or about 1.6 billion kilometers. In the manga, this is also suggested by Killy crossing an empty, spherical room roughly the size of Jupiter, suggesting that the planet had been there but was disassembled as the City grew.