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 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.
So the marine veteran and his state elections team are war-gaming out worst-case scenarios for election mishaps this fall. Truthfully, that’s not unique to Fontesand Arizona. Our local elections team does the same, just with less threat of bomb scares and armed vigilantes stalking polling and vote counting stations.
“Tiger teams” have been assembled to 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 in languages they do not know such as German and Mandarin. “They were very, very believable,” Fontes noted.
The election threat index reports that 53% of Arizonans are represented by Republicans in the legislature “with a proven track record of election denial.”
The strain is taking a toll on election workers who have dedicated their careers to fair and accurate administration of elections. Now the once-clerical work may include more security cameras, armed guards, and PTSD.
Arizona is suffering one of the severest brain drains of electoral knowhow in the country. Of its 15 counties, 12 have lost a top election administrator since the last presidential cycle, prised out by a constant barrage of bile.
Most of those quitting are women, a reflection of the predominance of female election officials and the often sexually charged nature of the threats.
Of the five members of the Maricopa county board of supervisors, two have announced they are not standing for re-election. [Clint] Hickman, recipient of the lynching threat, said recently that “it’s gotten worse and worse … I thought I was looking way too much in the rearview mirror”.
It’s a lengthy bit of reporting, but the indepependent state legislature theory cranks haven’t gone away, nor demands for hand counts. COVID-19 is not the pandemic it was in 2020, but there is no vaccine yet for MAGA fever. The people complaining that people are losing faith in elections are the very ones spreading conspiracy theories that undemine that faith.
Rather than reassuring his constituents that local elections are free, fair, and secure, Ron Gould, a Mohave county supervisor, demands hand counts:
Wouldn’t it be easier than moving to costly and cumbersome hand counts simply to tell his constituents that voting machines work?
“They’re hearing that from everybody, and that doesn’t make them believe it’s true. So if hand counts are what they want, I’m going to give them what they want,” he said.
Where does he think this could end?
“In a revolution, actually,” he said. “People are ginned up. They feel disenfranchised, disgusted, that they have no control over their lives or the political direction of their country. If they can’t solve it at the ballot box, then they’re going to do it in other ways.”
Giving them hand counts will not change a thing if Trump does not win, and maybe even if he does. First, because these are people who have rejected democracy except as window dressing for authoritarianism. And second, during a drawn-out, hand-count process, they’ll spread rumors that results are taking so long because dark forces are working to “steal” the election anyway. Feeding the delusion will not cure it. The reasoning is circular.
What happens here is that when MAGA types show up at regular Board of Elections meetings skeptical and intent on finding cheating, they find instead meticulous checks and balances, scrupulously followed that soften their opinions in time. It’s what they don’t know and think they do where conspiracy theories breed.
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