The experimental film of the season in the decisive state of Arizona is the multi-channel Internet broadcast – 24 hours a day, seven days a week – of the tabulation process of early votes cast in Maricopa County. It’s one of those movies where, as Gene Hackman’s character would say in The night moves, You see the grass grow. Its protagonists, dozens of election workers, spend the day sitting in pairs made up of a member of each party, verifying the defective ballots that the state-of-the-art counting machine did not process correctly. Sometimes a technician opens it and cleans it. Around noon, these workers, who are not allowed to have cell phones, eat or drink in the room, take turns going out for lunch or to have a cigarette. It is the most moment hectic of the day.
The authorities of this district – with a population of about 4.5 million inhabitants, the fastest growing in the United States – decided to place the cameras to broadcast this phenomenal ode to boredom in a display of transparency, after in 2020 this building located in an industrial area of Phoenix became ground zero for Donald Trump’s Big Lie, who lost in this decisive state by just over 10,000 votes and refused to admit that defeat. It was the first time Arizona had elected a Democrat since 1996 (Bill Clinton). So, the State had been red (Republican) since 1948 (Harry Truman).
Incredulous supporters of the still president, many of them armed, showed up here those days with personalities from the great American conspiracy industry such as the announcer Alex Jones at their head. It was the postcard that went around the world of a movement that denied the electoral result and that spread in other parts of the country, places where Joe Biden also won narrowly, such as Wisconsin or Georgia. The Trump campaign filed dozens of lawsuits to overturn the result, but no judge ruled in their favor. In Arizona, the court life of those lawsuits lasted for more than half a year. Eleven Republican “false electors” came together urgently and, before the count was completed three weeks after voting day, awarded Arizona’s electoral votes to Trump. These men and women are still awaiting trial for those events; It is scheduled for 2026, but the state Congress, with a conservative majority, has approved a law that could save them that drink.
Some election workers, who saw their names published on the Internet, faced threats. Things got worse in the next appointment, that of the 2022 midterm elections, in which the Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, lost and also denounced fraud. It didn’t exactly help that on election day dozens of ballot processing machines broke down and that hindered voting in some counties.
Nothing guarantees that next November 5, the day of the closest election in memory—in which Lake repeats as a candidate, this time for senator—will be different. But at least, “they have installed a metal fence that prevents access to the parking lot,” explained Adrian Borunda, spokesman for the Maricopa County Elections Department during a visit last week to the facilities. On election day, security will be reinforced by placing snipers in the building where the votes are counted and on the surrounding rooftops.
Previously, throughout the year, the counting center has been open to the visit of any citizen who wanted to see with their own eyes the “cleanliness” of the process. Stephen Richer, in charge of the Maricopa electoral process from his position as recorderestimates that he has held “about 80 meetings” with voters to give them explanations. Richer, who has been in the crosshairs of election deniers for years, lost the Republican Party primary last July and is not running for re-election next week.
Nor will Bill Gates, perhaps Arizona’s most famous official, continue. In your case, it is a personal decision. Last year he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the threats received, and he has decided to put his health and the peace of his family before the “civic commitment” that led him to work in the administration, also as a representative of the Republican Party, since 2009. From now on, he explained last week in an interview in his office with impressive views of the city of Phoenix that, he said, he will miss, he will work at Arizona State University in a “laboratory on democratic mechanisms.” .
After holding other positions in the Administration, Gates, who founded a Teen Republicans group when he was in high school, won the election for Maricopa County supervisor in 2016. He narrowly managed to get re-elected four years later. “I never imagined what that narrow victory was going to mean for me on a personal level,” he clarifies. Among other things, they have wished Gates, in writing or in telephone messages, that he would get cancer or that his daughter would be raped, and they have threatened to execute him by firing squad. “A guy sent me a letter,” Gates recalls, “in which he told me that he knew where I live, and where I buy my food, and that he knew how to poison it to kill me without a trace. It was a very specific message. Very scary.” A judge sentenced that man a few months ago to three years of probation.
After the 2022 elections, his wife advised Gates to go to the doctor because she saw him “more irascible than usual” and “like depressed.” There came the psychiatric diagnosis.
Early voting in Arizona began on October 9, and Gates regrets that some have already begun to spread “that poison of electoral theft.” “They are capable of watching the election for hours.” streaming of the tabulation center, and find suspicions where there are none. I don’t blame those who believe those lies. Most of them are good people, but they are intoxicated. I hope that everything remains in ugly words and that it does not cross the limit of physical violence,” explains the official. A documentary titled 2000 Mules(2022),whose conclusions have been denied by the judicial authorities.
On the day of our interview, a press conference was scheduled to reinforce the transparency of the process, and the next day, a media tour of the counting facilities was scheduled. “We are doing everything possible to transmit confidence among the voters, but we know that we will not be able to convince a few, we are counting on it,” admitted Borunda, from this side of the glass that separates the room without internet in which the officials count the ballots.
A visit to a voting center in a community center in Scottsdale, a city next to Phoenix, was enough to prove that not all voters are willing to believe in how the system works. In the queue to cast the ballot, a lively discussion broke out in which Brian took the lead (“that’s all the information you’re going to get from me,” he warned) and a woman named Sandy Barrett-Jackson. He said that “a friend of his” had seen how a vote for Kamala Harris was counted three times, but had no evidence of this.
“Stealing right now”
“The election is being stolen right now, as we speak,” Brian said. And what about the polls that last week looked better for Trump? “It’s all a trick so we can then tell ourselves: ‘Oh, we won by a hair.’ They will say that Harris got 81 million votes, compared to Trump’s 79, you’ll see. Is Arizona a deeply Republican state that Democrats suddenly win again and again? It doesn’t strain. The pandemic [que hizo que, por razones sanitarias, se extendiera el voto por adelantado] It gave them the opportunity to start deceiving on a massive scale.”
Barrett-Jackson, who arrived with the ballot “filled in from home” – Arizona’s has two pages, and a vote is requested for 79 positions, including that of president –, for her part, recalled a meme that places a ballot box in a cemetery to joke about an alleged Democratic practice of making the dead vote. Both called for a return to voting on Election Day and for tightening voter identification requirements.
In another electoral office in downtown Phoenix, an official, who asked to speak anonymously because the law does not allow him to make statements to the press, said that since early voting began, there had been no incidents “except for those who come to influence on voters with strange theories.” “Without going any further, before I have had to go out and throw out people who were talking to citizens where they shouldn’t have,” he explained.
Arizona rules do not allow proselytizing for either party or taking images within 25 meters of the polling station. The group of those expelled that morning wore green t-shirts and was a little further away, intercepting university students. It was not possible to find out what they intended, or who was in charge; First they looked for the supervisor, and he, upon seeing the press credential, left the place at a fast pace.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) has been training an army of “election observers” across the country for months. Two-thirds of his supporters, according to polls, believe that Biden won by cheating. The thousands of volunteers receive courses to monitor a process they doubt. “Once an election is certified, there is nothing that can be done,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said on a right-wing podcast in early October. “We will be there before, during and after the vote, to make sure everything is going to be in order.”
In Georgia – where the irresponsible defamations of Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s lawyer, ruined the lives of a mother and daughter (who are now waiting for Giuliani to pay them the $148 million fine that the judge imposed on him for those deceptions) – , have placed “panic buttons” within the reach of election employees.
In Wisconsin, another decisive state, they have been given courses with “conflict de-escalation” techniques, in case they need them to confront a distrustful voter. They are the new realities of a task that used to be boring and that conspiracy has turned these days into one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States.
Michael Mirer, one of those volunteers, who will count votes on November 5 in a Milwaukee suburb, explained in a recent interview that he signed up for this task to understand how the system worked inside and that he came to the conclusion that the “process is clean.” “Each vote can be traced from its origin to the end,” he said. Mirer also recalled one of the latest conspiracy theories of Trumpism, according to which undocumented immigrants vote (Democratic), even though the law prohibits it. “It is hardly credible that someone in that situation could expose themselves to committing a federal crime like that, which could send them to prison for decades,” he said.
In the days following the 2020 vote, Gates, the Maricopa County supervisor, received a message from Giuliani on his answering machine demanding the delivery of all ballots and counting machines. He decided not to return that call. Today, four years later, pressures like that have made him leave his job. What he will not do is abandon the party: “I do not intend to allow myself to be expelled by those who now dominate it. I look forward to the day when we return to our principles for which I decided to become a republican: individual autonomy, the free market and the defense of the rule of law.” “Promotion of paranoia,” he added, was not usually one of those principles.
