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 spilled its toxic load on to the facility storing voting equipment?
“Tiger teams” have been assembled that can be quickly dispatched across the state to fix software or other voting problems. To anticipate bad actors using artificial intelligence to create malicious deepfakes of candidates, his office has done its own AI manipulations, making videos in which individuals speak fluently languages they do not know such as German and Mandarin. “They were very, very believable,” he noted.
Specialists from the Department of Homeland Security have been deployed to advise counties on physical and cybersecurity. Active shooter drills have been rehearsed at polling stations.
As the Washington Post reported, kits containing tourniquets to staunch bloodletting, hammers for breaking glass windows and door-blocking devices have been distributed to county election offices. “These are not things we would ever want to train anybody on,” Fontes said. “But given the environment …”
With all this under way, Fontes insists he’s ready for anything. “We will prepare as best we can for any contingencies,” he said. “And then we have no choice but to march forward, hopefully.”
The MAGA cult is out of its mind. This bureaucrat has to have a bodyguard because of all the threats. And they are totally preparing for violence in November.
Read the whole article in the Guardian. It will make your hair stand on end. I don’t know if any of this is going to come to pass — I fervently hope not. But the fact that they have to prepare for it because that orange imbecile couldn’t admit that he lost is simply stunning. My God.
Update: