Four years after Donald Trump’s electoral defeat, America’s body politic is swimming in vote-rigging conspiracies pushed by a man who still refuses to admit that he lost.
Now an Arizona county is trying to keep its head above the water with a $32 million election center that includes a center-piece counting room made largely of glass, nicknamed “the fish tank”.
This state-of-the-art building in the small town of Florence will allow anyone to watch the entire ballot-handling process — the sorting, verification, and counting — on November 5.
Dozens of cameras are also trained on the space, with live streams available for all to see on the internet.
It “was real evident to me in 2020 that we are losing a lot of the trust of our residents,” Mike Goodman, a Republican and chairman of the board of supervisors in Pinal County, told AFP.
“In fact, people don’t vote because they think it’s already rigged. That’s what prompted us to build this building and make it as transparent as possible.”
Arizona was a close race in 2020, with President Joe Biden beating Trump by around 10,500 votes.
The narrow margin made the state a Ground Zero for conspiracy theorists who refuse to accept Trump’s loss, despite overwhelming evidence, exhaustive examinations and the rulings of multiple judges.
In an effort to avoid a repeat in 2024 when Kamala Harris faces off against Trump, Pinal County has opted for a strategy of what the county’s assistant recorder Garrett Glover calls “being radically transparent”.
“We want to be as transparent as possible for our voters, so they can come in and observe the entire process, from start to finish,” he said.
– Election deniers –
Behind the glass, the boxes used to bring the ballots from the polling stations are sealed with padlocks that can be tracked by satellites.
The counting machines are hooked up to a server that is not connected to the internet, with the color-coded cables visible for all to see in an effort to prove the system cannot be hacked.
“Every state needs to go through and really look at their processes and tone them up where they need to be toned,” said Goodman.
Distrust in the security of US elections is pervasive.
Less than half of Republicans are confident that November’s presidential election will be conducted fairly, according to a Pew Research Center study published in August.
These sorts of measures “are very impactful for doubters, and I think they’re very impactful for general citizens that just don’t understand the election process,” says Thom Reilly, a political scientist at Arizona State University.
But in a country where election procedures differ from state to state, and where distrust of institutions is growing, they can only go so far.
There are “those that will always be election deniers and have no openness to see these things differently,” he said.
– ‘Trust destroyed’ –
Pinal County, a Republican stronghold, is a case in point.
Kevin Cavanaugh, a county supervisor, ran unsuccessfully for sheriff in the Republican primaries this summer.
Like Trump, he disputes the fact of his loss.
In his office, the fifty-year-old displays a dozen graphs that he says prove electoral data was “manipulated.”
“I was doubtful about cheating until I saw it with my own eyes,” he said, adding that an $850-an-hour data analyst he hired told him the vote was skewed.
An independent audit of votes in the county that was published last week found “no evidence of fraud, data manipulation, or other factors that could have impacted the election results.”
Elected officials who help run the balloting should be above the fray, sighs Goodman, who blames Cavanaugh for the resignations of several 2020 election workers.
“When you get electeds that people put so much trust and confidence in and they’re not trustworthy… that’s where the trust gets destroyed from the public as a whole,” said Goodman.
Standing in front of the “fish tank” where ballots will be counted, voter Tim Vendettuoli thinks it was worth the expense.
At 72, this retired Republican believes that vote drop-off boxes were stuffed in 2020 — an assertion for which there is no evidence.
But this year, he feels, will be a lot smoother — in Pinal County, at least.
“If every county was run like this, I think we would have a really good election,” he said.
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