When Gabriella Cázares-Kelly started her job as the Pima County Recorder in early 2021, her workplace “was a quiet, sleepy office that nobody really cared about,” she said. It didn’t last long as Arizona's election crisis began.

Months after taking office, Cázares-Kelly, who was elected to the position in November 2020, became inundated with media requests, accusations of election fraud and — most concerningly — threats and harassment. It was fallout from the 2020 election, in which former President Donald Trump and his sycophants refused to accept that he lost the race and callously spread dangerous conspiracy theories about election fraud.

Cázares-Kelly thought the pandemonium would eventually settle and she could administer the 2022 midterm election without so much noise, averting Arizona's election crisis.

The calm never came.

“I kept waiting for things to die back down and normalize again to the sleepy quiet office that I first ran for,” she recalled. “I think I finally came to the realization that the face of elections has changed permanently. I think there’s been a permanent change because of the 2020 election and the level of scrutiny and concern.”

Since 2020, when Trump and the GOP promoted dangerous conspiracy theories and made false claims of mass voter fraud, beginning Arizona's election crisis, Republicans in key swing states have been embroiled in an ideological civil war between moderates and the party’s far-right extremists. In Georgia, for example, the state’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp — who has his own rich history of far-right extremism — has been decidedly castigated by Trump and the party for not helping the former president cheat in the 2020 election — all the while MAGA loyalists have taken over the State Election Board (SEB) and are trying to rewrite election rules to help Trump. And in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the Republican Party is similarly seeing this ideological battle play out, mirroring Arizona's election crisis.

That ideological tug-of-war is absent in Arizona. Instead, far-right extremists have taken over the state’s Republican Party and — four years later — the Grand Canyon State is still the epicenter of election conspiracies, harassment toward election officials and an all-out assault on voting rights from the Arizona GOP. According to Democracy Docket’s litigation database, there have been 18 anti-voting lawsuits filed in Arizona in the 2023-2024 election cycle — the highest number of any state.

Read the full article about Arizona's election crisis by Matt Cohen at Democracy Docket.