Conspiracies about the U.S. electoral process have taken hold all over the country, but nowhere more fervently than in Arizona. Why has the state become the focal point for rigged-election claims?
I spent the first week of November, 2020, at a gun range outside Prescott, Arizona, taking a class in tactical firearm skills. On Tuesday of that week—Election Day—after practicing speed reloads, I sat in my hotel room and watched the returns. After Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden, I went to sleep. The state hadn’t given its electoral votes to a Democrat in close to twenty-five years, and the next morning my classmates were dismayed.
Election conspiracies began gaining traction there in 2018, when Democrats made a surprisingly strong showing in the midterms, flipping a Senate seat. Republicans had comfortably controlled most of the state government for decades, and the results came as a shock to some. Two years later, Biden won the state by fewer than eleven thousand votes. Since then, Republican officials in Arizona have gone further in attempting to overturn the 2020 results than those anywhere else.
Arizona has a strong libertarian strain, embodied most famously by Barry Goldwater, which is amenable to anti-government conspiracies. “For those strongly inclined toward skepticism of the government, it doesn’t take much to convince them that an election might be rigged, particularly when inundated with disinformation suggesting as much,” Joshua Sellers, an elections expert and an associate professor of law at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, said.
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