ON A GLORIOUS SPRING DAY IN PHOENIX, in an atrium beneath the majestic cupola of the old state Capitol, secretary of state Adrian Fontes is celebrating Arizona’s 112th birthday.
He solemnly recites President William Howard Taft’s proclamation welcoming Arizona as the 48th state of the union. Speeches fete the state’s landscapes, from the Grand Canyon to the deserts of Yuma and lush green forests of Coconino, then a cake iced with the state seal is cut into 112 pieces and devoured in the sun-dappled Rose Garden.
There is only one discordant note on this otherwise joyous day. Who is that person standing silently and alert behind Fontes? Why is Arizona’s chief election administrator, responsible for the smooth operation of November’s presidential election, in need of a bodyguard?
“It’s very sad,” Fontes said. “It’s a sad state of affairs that in a civil society, in one of the most advanced civilisations that anybody could have imagined, we have to worry about physical violence.”
These are troubled times in Arizona. Until 2020, election officials were the anonymous folk who made sure democracy run smoothly.
All that changed with Donald Trump’s unprecedented refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election. His conspiracy to subvert the election has had an explosive impact in Arizona, a battleground state that has become arguably the ground zero of 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 contains 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 melee, election officials found themselves assailed by online harassment and death threats. No longer faceless bureaucrats, they had become public enemy No 1.
With the likely presidential rematch between Trump and Biden just eight months away, Fontes is facing a formidable challenge. He is preparing for it like the veteran Marine that he is.
The secretary of state is staging tabletop exercises in which officials wargame how to react to worst-case scenarios. What would they do if a fire broke out at the
