WTF is happening here? These are troubled times in Arizona. Until 2020, election officials were the largely anonymous folk who did the important yet unseen work of making democracy run smoothly. “Nobody knew who we were, what we did,” Fontes said ruefully. “It’s a little bit different now.” All changed with Donald Trump’s unprecedented refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election. His conspiracy to subvert the election has had an explosive impact in Arizona, a battleground state which has become arguably the ground zero of election denial in America. In 2020, the Republican-controlled state legislature sponsored a widely discredited “audit” of votes in Maricopa county, the largest constituency containing Phoenix. Republican leaders put themselves forward as fake electors in a possibly criminal attempt to flip Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona to Trump’s. Two years later, in the midterms, armed vigilantes dressed in tactical gear stalked drop boxes in a vain hunt for “mules” stuffing fraudulent ballots into them. Amid the furore, election officials found themselves assailed by online harassment and death threats. No longer faceless bureaucrats, they had become public enemy No 1. With the likely presidential rematch between Trump and Biden just eight months away, Fontes, as top elections administrator, is facing a formidable challenge. He is preparing for it like the marine veteran that he is. The secretary of state is staging tabletop exercises in which officials wargame how to react to worst-case scenarios. What would they do if a fire broke out at the ballot printing warehouse, or if a cargo train…