Donald Trump called the outcome of the 2020 election, when he lost to Joe Biden, a “big lie.” Trump’s “big lie” led a group of armed people to the door of the vote-counting center in Maricopa County, Arizona, after the polls closed. Four years later, the building is surrounded by a two-meter-high fence and at the entrance are two officers searching backpacks after going through the metal detector. Security measures are stopping people, but conspiracy theories don’t seem to have completely disappeared.
Vice President and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’ team fears Trump will declare himself the winner without an official result. According to NBC, Harris campaign officials say they “fully expect” Trump to declare victory before all the votes are counted, and that there are hundreds of Democratic attorneys across the country and in the most contested states, ready to fight against the party’s legal maneuvers. the Republican Party.
“We do not exclude that they will appeal against the voting process after the elections,” Adrián Borunda, spokesperson for the Maricopa County Elections Department, explained to elDiario.es during a visit to the facilities. The post-election hypothesis used by Borunda is already a reality in Pennsylvania: Republicans have presented to the state Supreme Court an emergency order that could leave thousands of votes uncounted in this key state, decisive for making tilt the electoral balance.
After challenging thousands of votes, Trump released this Wednesday on your Truth Social profile that “Pennsylvania is cheating and exposed on a scale never seen before.”
“REPORT TRAPS TO AUTHORITIES. The law must act NOW,” the Republican said. The former president assures that a campaign of electoral fraud is already underway in a state where none of the votes (not even those sent by mail) begin to be counted before the polls close on November 5.
In Bucks County, a suburb of Philadelphia, Republicans filed a lawsuit against authorities for “impeding” Republican voting. Of the seven Swing StatesPennsylvania distributes the most delegates to the Electoral College and is considered one of the most competitive territories for both presidential candidates.
But that doesn’t mean other territories are safe from conspiracy theories.
In Maricopa last week, a man was arrested for setting fire to an absentee ballot collection box. Five days later, mail-in ballot collection boxes were also set on fire in the states of Oregon and Washington. These mailboxes, called drop boxeshave for years been a hotbed of unfounded right-wing and orbital conspiracy theories. trumpeter.
In recent weeks, the Trumpism also oiled the machinery of the “big lie”. At the Madison Square rally last Sunday, journalist Tucker Carlson assured that “it’s going to be very difficult for them to say that Kamala Harris got 85 million votes and that the first former prosecutor of California […] with a low IQ is elected president. Suspicion of the North American electoral system has been a constant in the Republican’s actions. Although this is not the only channel through which they spread.
“November 5 will be the beginning of the end,” Steve Bannon, recently released from prison, said Thursday. The ultra ideologue is the one who whispered in Trump’s ear the possibility of carrying out a coup on January 6, 2021, and this summer he went to prison for refusing to collaborate with the legislative commission investigating the assault on the Capitol. “Perhaps this is what Churchill defined as the Battle of El Alamein,” he said in the video posted on Instagram. The quote from the former British Prime Minister that Bannon was referring to is: “Before El Alamein, we had never won a victory. After El Alamein, we never experienced defeat.
fertilized land
During these four years, the Trumpist orbit has continued to fuel distrust of the voting processes. The “big lie” has always been there, lurking, waiting for Trump to give the order.
In July, a South Carolina delegate who attended the Republican Convention expressed confidence in Trump’s victory and assured elDiario.es that he would not let the election be “stolen” again. Earlier this month, attendees of Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, applauded Elon Musk’s call to “protect the vote.” It was October 5, just a month before the election, but Rick Shawn, one of the event attendees, was convinced that “Trump is going to lose because the election is rigged.”
In Tempe, Arizona, on October 17, Donald Trump Jr. and MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk speculated in front of an audience of mostly 20-year-olds about alleged hacks in vote counting machines, on undocumented immigrants who register to vote and on the projects of the deep state to get Trump out of the way. “In the last election, they lied to us, they cheated,” Karen explained, listening attentively to the speech, “if Trump loses, it will be because there was fraud.” A few rows away, in the Omni Hotel room where the event was taking place, Brittany and her husband were repeating similar slogans.
“Nothing was normal during the last elections. I remember we were watching the news, and it was early in the evening, and I think they had only counted about 10% of the votes, and all of a sudden they announced that Biden had won . And Arizona hadn’t voted for a Democrat in decades. So nothing was normal. These elections, I am always very worried about what could happen, as we hear, with migrants registering on the electoral lists when they cannot do so,” explained Brittany, who came from Phoenix not to miss the event.
Arizona, ground zero of the conspiracy
The conference was organized by the Turning Point Action platform, one of the main speakers on the theories of electoral fraud in 2020 and which in the state of Arizona was particularly active. Arizona, which is also a swing state these elections, has become the vanguard of electoral denialism. The wing trumpeter has taken control of the Arizona Republican Party and remains convinced that fraud was committed in Maricopa, even though the county supervisor, Republican Stephen Richer, has certified that the vote count was flawless.
Going against Trump’s mandate, Richer was not only ostracized by the party, but also became the target of death threats. Some of them were initiated by members of the Republican Party, such as Senate candidate Kari Lake, who Richer filed a lawsuit against for continuing to make false statements about the vote count in Maricopa County .
In the midterm elections –halfway through– In 2022, Lake replicated Trump’s tactics: he accused the election result of “theft” after losing to Democrat Katie Hobbs for governor. The Republican still does not recognize his defeat.
Election denialism not only led to death threats against Richer, but also gave rise to instances of intimidation against election workers. “We have several people who have been victims of intimidation and some have left their jobs,” confirmed the spokesperson for the Maricopa County Elections Department.
Thanks to theories of fraud, not only was the counting building fortified, but policies of maximum transparency were also applied: 24-hour cameras where one can see live how the counting process takes place, overhead cables to clearly see where the counting is located. counters and guided tours to the public are connected. All this to assuage distrust in the system.
“Those from Turning Point Action also came to visit us one day. They had a lot of questions, but I think they left satisfied,” Borunda explained during the visit to the center. After the episode of violence they experienced in Maricopa four years ago, and following threats and intimidation, election workers are receiving training not only on the electoral process, but also on security. “We explain to them what to do in case an angry person appears on voting day or what to do in case of problems,” Borunda said.
A new criteria that was also included to decide where Maricopa voting points will be activated is that “we know that we will be able to block access to the interior once the day is over and ensure that no one can enter the venue “. In addition to the two-meter-high barrier, on the night of November 5, the Maricopa vote counting center will benefit from the deployment of a large police force which will have the presence of FBI agents and even snipers .
