Ground Zero For Election Denialism

Created
Mon, 18/03/2024 - 00:00
Updated
Mon, 18/03/2024 - 00:00
No vaccine yet for MAGA fever That’s the thing about democracy. When it’s working smoothly no one notices. Public officials derided as the Deep State do their jobs, underpaid compared to the private sector, and deliver your mail, take away your trash, deposit your Social Security checks, run your police department. A small army of them administer elections in your state, unseen save for the handful of retirees you see every two years at your polling station. “Nobody knew who we were, what we did,” [Arizona Secretary of State Adrian] Fontes said ruefully. “It’s a little bit different now.” Fontes now has a bodyguard, reports The Guardian: “It’s very sad,” Fontes said. “It’s a sad state of affairs that in a civil society, in one of the most advanced civilizations that anybody could have imagined, we have to worry about physical violence.” 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. The MAGA cult changed all that, although it’s not as if election conspiracy theories were new on the right. Donald “91 Counts” Trump just supercharged them when he refused to accept defeat in the 2020 election. Arizona became “ground zero for election denial in America.” In 2020, the Republican-controlled state legislature sponsored a widely discredited “audit” of votes in Maricopa county, the largest constituency, which contain Phoenix. Republican leaders put themselves forward as fake electors in a possibly criminal attempt to flip Joe…