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In 2020, conspiracy theories about voter fraud ran rampant — culminating in a mob overtaking the Capitol to overturn President Joe Biden’s certification vote on Jan. 6, 2021.
Four years later in Maricopa County, Arizona, election officials are preparing for the worst and hoping for the best.
“2024 is going to be unpredictable and we’re as prepared as you can be,” said Taylor Kinnerup, the communications director for the Maricopa County Recorder’s office.
Maricopa County in particular became the center of national attention when Arizona flipped blue for the first time since 1996 in a tight race between Biden and former President Donald Trump, causing Republicans to cast doubt on the county’s election process. The result was an audit of votes that critics denounced as highly partisan.
Now, the recorder’s office is working to preemptively combat election denialism. Some of the denialism comes from out-of-state instigators, Kinnerup said, but Maricopa County residents can also be mistrustful of the voting process. She said the county’s constituent services department can receive thousands of inquiries a day during the height of election fervor.
The questions, Kinnerup said, range from “innocuous” such as “where’s my polling location and where can I cast my ballot?” to much more serious: “We believe you stole the election and we’re going to prove it.”
The Maricopa County Recorder’s office has heard all the conspiracy theories, Kinnerup said, and can debunk them all.
It’s hard to quantify how the attitude toward election integrity has changed over the years because there hasn’t been sufficient data to track it, according to Northwestern political science professor Laurel Harbridge-Yong, an expert on partisan conflict and the author of a study on threats of violence against elected officials.
Harbridge-Yong noted that it seems like threats and harassment against officials have picked up since 2016. In just one month in Maricopa County in 2022, election workers received 140 threats, including death threats, because of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Stephen Richer, the county recorder, and other Maricopa County officials had “legitimate” threats that were investigated by the FBI, according to Kinnerup.
The sentiment stretches far beyond Maricopa County. In the heavily red state of South Carolina, some voters casted doubt on the integrity of the 2020 election — with at least one joining local officials to assuage his concerns.
During early voting hours in the lead up to the South Carolina Republican primary, Lenice Shoemaker, the director of Lexington County’s registration and elections, flitted between the room where a dozen voters are casting ballots and the back rooms filled with empty ballot boxes and poll workers.
Her Carolina Gamecocks lanyard is decorated with a variety of pins: “IDK, Google it” in a text message bubble, a pink and blue “Pointless meeting survivor” badge and the American and Israeli flags. Shoemaker has spent 10 years as an election worker, and two and a half years as director.
Just after casting her vote at the Lexington polling center, Hillary Higgins, a dance studio owner from the nearby town of Batesburg-Leesville, said that she had some “questions that never got fully cleared up” about the 2020 election.
“Election results should be finalized the day of,” Higgins said. “There’s no need for it to continue on for multiple days.”
As Shoemaker explained the primary’s watertight vote-counting process in the back rooms of the polling center, one election worker, Matthew McGinnis, couldn’t help but chime in. Six months ago, he didn’t feel the election process was secure, he said. Becoming an election worker changed that.
“Now that I know the process, I’m not afraid,” he said. “We have checks upon checks.”
Shoemaker said election security concerns are “frustrating.”
“Let me show you my hometown,” she said.
The harassment and overall mistrust in the election process has taken a toll on election workers. A study done by the election reform nonprofit Issue One found that half of Americans living in the western United States will have a new local election official in 2024 due to election worker turnover. In Arizona, 98% of people will be served by a new election official.
“There are conspiracy theorists and extremists that have been putting extra pressure on election officials [and] making their life difficult,” said Michael Beckel, the group’s research director and author of the study. “We as a country should be uniting to make sure that they can step up and safely and securely run the 2024 elections.”
That might be a tall order just six months out from the same contentious presidential matchup as 2020. Harbridge-Yong said putting forward new candidates is the only way to move on from the current hyper-polarization around elections — which would also only happen post-2024.
For now, officials are doing all they can on the ground to combat election denialism. Kinnerup said Maricopa County is opening their voting tabulation center for people to see the process with their own eyes, and Shoemaker is always happy to show people around her voting center.
“There’s obviously no way to predict what could happen in 2024,” Kinnerup said. “But we are fully prepared to use what we’ve learned in 2020 to move forward with whatever occurs.”