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Tue. Oct 22nd, 2024
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Snipers will be present in Arizona’s 2024 elections. Blame Trump and Lake

By Sheisoe
Snipers will be present in Arizona’s 2024 elections. Blame Trump and Lake

Drones will be in the air and snipers on the roof as votes are counted in Maricopa County. And it’s completely understandable, considering the candidates who will say anything to sow doubt in elections.

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Armed guards at the gate and metal detectors at the door.

Snipers on the roof.

Drones in the sky.

Welcome to the front lines of one of the country’s most important battleground states — a place where election workers not only practice the finer points of counting ballots, but must also be prepared to wield a fire hose, should the need arise to to ward off crowds once the votes are in.

Sounds exaggerated, but this is Arizona 2024, where democracy has become a blood sport and red, white and blue have given way to red, white and black and blue.

Trump and Lake proclaimed that they had really won

Arizona election workers have been on high alert for four years as they face intimidation and death threats.

All this because Donald Trump declared Arizona’s election stolen. The Republican Party-led Senate promptly launched a months-long audit of the vote in Maricopa County — an audit for and by Trump sympathizers.

One that showed our election wasn’t stolen.

Of course, none of that mattered to the politically and financially ambitious — Trump’s most loyal local sycophants, who continued to shout at the top of their lungs that, yes, the Arizona election was stolen.

Then came 2022 and it was rinse and repeat, this time with Kari Lake erupting in outrage after the votes for governor were counted and she didn’t win. (She subsequently lost not one but two trials after presenting her “evidence” of fraud.)

Trump is laying the foundation again. Lake doesn’t want to talk

Now there are questions about whether Trump and Lake will once again lay the groundwork to claim fraud should the results of the Nov. 5 election not go their way.

There is Trump ramping up his dire warnings that Kamala Harris “can only win through deception,” that illegal immigrants will disrupt the polls and that if he loses it will be the country’s “last election.”

“They’re cheating. That’s all they want to do: cheat. And when you see this, this is the only way they’re going to win,” Trump said at a rally in Wisconsin earlier this month. “And we can’t let that happen, and we can’t let that happen again. We will have no land left.”

Lake, meanwhile, continues to dispute her 2022 loss, and on Friday she dodged questions about whether she would accept the results of the Nov. 5 election.

“If this race is conducted, the campaign will of course be conducted legally, in accordance with the law. There is nothing other than I want to accept that,” she told reporters.

When asked how she will measure whether the election is legitimate — for example, if Trump wins and she loses, as polls in Arizona suggest might be the case — Lake’s response was an attack on the reporter, Ronald J. Hansen of the Arizona Republic, and newspaper. .

“Ron, your outlet is, I think, one of the least respected outlets in journalism history,” Lake said. “You’ve written twenty hit songs in a row about me.”

In other words, she has no intention of answering the question.

No wonder there will be drones and snipers

Which brings us to the Wall Street Journal’s weekend profile on preparations for the election now just two weeks away.

The Maricopa County Tabulation and Elections Center is now protected by a 7-foot wrought-iron fence, concrete barriers and armed guards at every door, the Journal notes. As votes are counted, drones will patrol overhead, police snipers will station themselves on nearby rooftops and mounted patrols will be on standby.

Inside, election workers have been trained in how to barricade themselves in a room or wield a fire hose to fend off armed mobs.

Everything has changed in the pursuit of democracy.

Opinion: Elon Musk is covering the Arizona election… again

“Ten years ago, no one took pictures of temporary workers and their license plates as they left the building,” Joshua Heywood, the executive assistant to County Recorder Stephen Richer, told the Journal.

But a decade ago, no one was sending election officials love notes like, “You’re going to die, you piece of s… We’re going to hang you,” or the succinct and always popular, “We hope you die.”

Election workers have faced many threats

Then there was the Texas man sentenced last year to three and a half years in prison for making threats against Richer and Tom Liddy, the deputy county attorney who successfully defended election cases, and poll workers.

“Hypothetically, a mass shooting of poll workers and election officials in these highly suspect areas could be the way to go,” Frederick Francis Goltz wrote on a right-wing social media site shortly after the 2022 election.

Goltz is one of a handful of people convicted of making threats against election workers in Maricopa County.

Meanwhile, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney declined to order the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office to release the names of low-level election workers to the We the People Alliance.

“The threats and intimidation these workers face are both alarming and pervasive,” Blaney wrote.

We the People is led by Shelby Busch, a GOP official and hard-right activist from Maricopa County who was caught on video this summer saying she wanted to “lynch” Richer.

She later said she was just joking, because who doesn’t love a good lynching joke?

So yeah, drones and snipers?

Suddenly that doesn’t seem so far out of line at all.

Reach Roberts at [email protected]. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) at @LaurieRobertsaz and on Threads at @LaurieRobertsaz.

Subscribe today to azcentral.com.

By Sheisoe

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