A culture of conspiracy haunts Arizona’s elections

“YOU’RE ON live streaming right now,” says Jennifer Liewer, a deputy elections director for Maricopa County, Arizona. “You can wave to your friends.” She takes your correspondent round the vote-tabulation centre, known as MCTEC, in downtown Phoenix. She points to cameras attached to the ceiling. They record everything that happens here. The county began broadcasting every hour of every day after the 2020 elections, when Maricopa’s results were audited several times over.

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

Yet with close elections comes attention. Since 2020 Arizona has been embroiled in controversy over the fairness of its elections. When Donald Trump lost the state that year, he called Rusty Bowers, the Republican speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, and asked him to overturn Arizona’s results. Mr Bowers declined, and in 2022 lost his primary to a candidate endorsed by the former president. A partisan audit conducted by Cyber Ninjas, an obscure company with no election-audit experience, could not refute Mr Biden’s victory. But many Republicans cried wolf nonetheless. In 2022 Kari Lake, a MAGA warrior and former news presenter, refused to accept that she lost the governor’s race.

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 “I became withdrawn.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

A sense of unease now permeates the valley. Officials are hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. MCTEC will soon become a fortress. Two layers of fencing surround the building. On election night a SWAT team will be stationed on the roof and officers will patrol the perimeter on horseback. “This will be the safest place in Arizona,” says Ms Liewer.

Officials point to three threats to an orderly process. This year Maricopa County’s ballots will be two pages long. Twice the paper means longer queues and processing times. Mr Gates reckons the counting will be “95% done by the end of election week”. But he worries that conspiracies will spread in the time between when polls close and results are released. Ms Liewer is alert to an insider threat. The county will hire some 600 people to work at MCTEC. There is a chance that not all will be trustworthy, despite vetting. This year a clerk stole a key needed to access computers with sensitive information. He was caught and arrested. Finally, the threat of political violence looms large. Poll workers are trained in de-escalation tactics in case voters, or protesters, get heated.

Further risks loom. A study by Andrew Hall and Janet Malzahn at Stanford University suggests that, in 2022, election deniers running in statewide and federal races underperformed other Republicans by an average of 3.2 percentage points. Candidates who have cast doubt on the results of elections, without proof, are running for office despite this penalty. They want to take charge of Maricopa’s elections.

One closely watched county race is for recorder. Mr Richer lost the Republican primary to Justin Heap, a state representative who has called 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 recorder was never a dream of his. “You assume you’ll take a stance on something that’s of real importance to you—the environment or the economy or education,” he says. “You’re not like: I’d like to just keep the system from entirely collapsing.”

Ms Lake is running for the Senate. She is pushing people to vote early. “Take it to a drop box, even though I hate those damn things,” she tells a crowd in Anthem, on the valley’s northern edge. But she is trailing Ruben Gallego, a Democratic congressman, in the polls.

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

Maricopa County’s Republican Party has adopted a new slogan. It hopes Mr Trump’s victory will be “too big to rig”.■