Conspiracy culture haunts Arizona elections

“YYou are ready “Live now,” says Jennifer Lewer, deputy director of elections in Maricopa County, Arizona. “You can wave to your friends.” Take your correspondent on a tour of the vote tabulation center, known as… Maktikin downtown Phoenix. She points to the cameras hanging on the ceiling. They record everything that happens here. The county began broadcasting hourly every day after the 2020 election, when Maricopa results were revised several times.

Arizona is one of seven swing states that will actually decide the results of the US presidential election. Arizona’s results will be largely decided in Maricopa County, which straddles the saguaro-covered desert with Phoenix at its heart. Nearly 60% of Arizona’s 4.1 million registered voters live there. It is now the largest swing county in America. In 2020, Joe Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Maricopa since Harry Truman in 1948.

But as the election approaches comes attention. Since 2020, Arizona has been embroiled in controversy over the integrity of its elections. When Donald Trump lost the state that year, he called Rusty Powers, the Republican speaker of the state House, and asked him to overturn Arizona’s results. Mr. Powers refused, and in 2022 he lost the primary to a candidate endorsed by the former president. A partisan review conducted by Cyber ​​Ninjas, a shadowy company with no experience auditing elections, was unable to disprove Biden’s victory. But many Republicans cried foul nonetheless. In 2022 Carey Lake, a Maga The warrior and former news anchor refused to accept losing the governor’s race.

As the conspiracies increased, election officials came under attack. Bill Gates, who is not a Microsoft celebrity but on the county Board of Supervisors, which oversees elections, has received death threats. “It started to really affect me,” he recalls. “I became withdrawn. I became angry in a way I had never been before.” Shelby Bush, vice chair of the local Republican Party, said she would “execute” Steven Richer, a fellow Republican and county recorder (a position that oversees voter rolls and mail-in voting) who defended the integrity of Maricopa elections. She later admitted that “was probably a bad choice of words.”

Now there is a feeling of unease in the valley. Officials are hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. Maktik It will soon become a fortress. Two layers of fencing surround the building. On election night a Swat The team will be stationed on the surface and officers will patrol the perimeter on horseback. “This will be the safest place in Arizona,” Ms. Lewer says.

Officials point to three threats to an organized operation. Ballots in Maricopa County this year will be two pages long. Weak paper means longer lines and longer processing times. Gates believes that the votes will be counted “95% by the end of election week.” But he is concerned about the spread of conspiracies in the period between the closing of the polls and the announcement of the results. Ms. Lewer is on alert for an insider threat. The district will hire about 600 people to work there Maktik. There is a possibility that not everyone will be trustworthy, despite the scrutiny. This year an employee stole the key needed to access computers containing sensitive information. He was caught and arrested. Finally, the threat of political violence looms. Poll workers are trained in de-escalation techniques in the event of angry voters or protesters.

Count Maricopa

Other risks loom on the horizon. A study by Andrew Hall and Janet Malzahn at Stanford University suggests that in 2022, election deniers in federal and state races underperformed other Republicans by an average of 3.2 percentage points. Candidates who questioned the election results, without evidence, ran for office despite this penalty. They want to take charge of Maricopa elections.

One closely watched county race is for the recorder. Richer lost the Republican primary to Justin Hipp, a state representative who called the local elections a “laughing stock.” He will face Tim Stringham, a Democrat who wants to make the job boring again. He jokes that running for registrar was never a dream of his. “You assume you’re going to take a stand on something that is of real importance to you — the environment, the economy, or education,” he says. “You don’t like: I would just like to keep the system from completely collapsing.”

Ms. Lake is running for Senate. It gets people to vote early. “Take it to the drop box, even though I hate those damned things,” she told a crowd in Anthem, on the northern edge of the valley. But she trails Ruben Gallego, a Democratic congressman, in the polls.

Arizona has a tradition of suspicion of government. When Barry Goldwater, a Republican state senator, accepted his party’s nomination for president in 1964, he declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Never-Trump Republicans in Arizona point to the 1988 impeachment of the right-wing governor, Evan Mecham, as the moment that radicalized the extreme fringes of their party. “These people were offended, they thought they were on a holy crusade,” says John Giles, Mesa’s Republican mayor. “It’s Evan Mecham 2.0 with Donald Trump.” A poll conducted by Samara Klar of the University of Arizona indicates that 27% of Arizonans, and 42% of Arizona Republicans, are not convinced their elections were conducted fairly.

The Maricopa County Republican Party has adopted a new slogan. She hopes that Trump’s victory will be “too big to be manipulated.”■

Stay up to date on US politics with The we In short, our daily newsletter with quick analysis of the most important election stories, Checks and Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington columnist on the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters.