Maricopa County is home to Arizona State University, premier urban hiking destination Camelback Mountain, and major sports teams like the Phoenix Suns. These days, though, the region is perhaps best known as a scalding-hot cauldron of electoral alchemy, where far-right conspiracy theories are conjured but not contained.
In the lead-up to this year’s midterms, Maricopa County has already produced multiple discrete panics over alleged interference. Earlier this month, conservative watchdog group We the People USA Alliance shared security-camera footage showing two county employees working at a ballot tabulation center after hours, and suggested they’d been caught red-handed tampering with election equipment. (In fact, according to county officials , those employees were merely working late on a routine software update ahead of a holiday weekend.)
Just a week earlier, Runbeck Election Services, a private company contracted to print and mail ballots for Maricopa County, mistakenly sent out 3,126 early-ballot packets six days ahead of schedule. Although county officials determined the ballots were still valid , President Donald Trump called Maricopa County “ very, very dishonest ,” refusing to accept the explanation that the premature mailing was simply an error.
These are just the latest examples of fraud allegations in the area stemming from perfectly explicable incidents—or fabricated out of whole cloth. It’s a shameful tradition that stretches back to the 2020 election, and sticks around as persistently as a hanging chad. While elections in Maricopa County have reliably inspired conspiracy theories and investigations that never turn up anything resembling a smoking gun, that hasn’t stopped lawmakers and conservative activists in other states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin , from copying the playbook.
So what is it about Maricopa County that keeps GOP operatives chasing phantoms?
From red to purple
Maricopa County is enormous. The Census Bureau estimates its 2025 population at nearly 4.7 million , making it the fourth-most-populous county in the United States. It also accounts for roughly 60% of Arizona’s total voters . But it’s not just the county’s size that makes it fertile ground for election conspiracy theories. Maricopa is also a microcosm of Arizona’s political transformation, and the axis of tension between its past and present.
Arizona was a reliably red state for nearly 70 years before it started transitioning to purple around the 2018 midterms . Maricopa County reflects that shift, encompassing Dem-leaning Phoenix, which The New York Times dubbed the U.S.’s fastest-growing city in 2021, along with firmly GOP suburbs and opulent neighborhoods. For Republicans accustomed to winning in Arizona, Trump’s loss of the state in November 2020 was difficult to reconcile with its political history. To some, the outcome seemed downright fishy.
It certainly did not help matters that Trump spent the months leading up to that election priming his supporters to believe the only way he could lose is if the election were rigged . In a county as electorally consequential as Maricopa, the combination of a changing political landscape and a president casting doubt on the legitimacy of defeat helped make the area a focal point for election conspiracy theories.
A brief history of electoral fearmongering in Arizona
The story of what happened in Maricopa County in 2020 is essentially the story of what happened throughout the U.S. that year: A president portraying himself as sole arbiter of objective reality disputed the outcome of an election, and his supporters took up the cause.
Because the margin of Trump’s loss in Arizona was roughly 11,000 votes, it perhaps seemed a slight enough defeat that it could be overturned in the face of alleged irregularities. (Trump famously got caught pleading with Georgia’s secretary of state to “ find 11,780 votes ” late in 2020, having lost that state by a similarly slim number.) Arizona thus became a stand-in for all of America. If the president could prove he’d been cheated there, it might unravel the whole sweater of his humiliating defeat.
Arizona politicians quickly joined Trump’s inner circle in amplifying specious claims . They pushed flimsy theories about improperly counted mail ballots , forged signatures , and compromised tabulators . They also filed an ultimately meritless lawsuit against Maricopa County. None of it unearthed even a shred of evidence that suggested Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate. Even a partisan audit by the Arizona Senate using the now-defunct, hilariously janky-sounding Florida firm Cyber Ninjas upheld Biden’s victory.
All of these inconvenient facts, however, failed to dissuade anyone heavily invested in the idea that Trump had been robbed.
Rather than convince the MAGA faithful that Trump had created a false narrative about rigged elections, the loss paradoxically seemed to strike them as proof he’d been right all along. In the years since, “election integrity” has become a shibboleth for MAGA politicians and their voters, who have absorbed the conspiratorial wisdom of “if we lose, it means they cheated.”
Social media sites like X helped lend a sheen of legitimacy to half-baked stories about dirty deeds in Maricopa County, through sheer repetition and reach. A rumor in 2020 that Sharpie pens were invalidating Trump voters’ ballots quickly spread from local accounts to conservative operatives like Matt Schlapp and both Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. , transforming tactical gossip into a scandal worthy of the -gate suffix. Researchers tracking the Sharpiegate episode counted more than 80,000 tweets about it in less than two hours .
In reality, election officials had tested many pens for their new tabulation equipment and found that Sharpies dry the fastest , reducing the potential for ballot smears. But reality isn’t particularly useful in furthering the myth of a stolen election.
This is how a Maricopa County conspiracy theory metastasizes. Someone ascribes a shady motive to an ambiguous moment, and if enough people believe it or at least post about it, the interpretation gains momentum. It’s a process that rewards anyone with a suspicious-sounding anecdote and an obscure X account with being retweeted by a MAGA celebrity and reaching a massive audience.
AZ update: apparently the use of sharpie pens in gop precincts is causing ballots to be invalidated. Could be huge numbers of mostly Trump supporters. More to come
— Matt Schlapp (@mschlapp) November 4, 2020
The same pattern repeated in 2022 when one such MAGA celebrity, former Phoenix news anchor Kari Lake, lost a gubernatorial race in Arizona . First, the ambiguous incident: A printing issue at several precincts prevented some ballots from being scanned on-site. Then comes the shady motive: Turning Point USA’s Tyler Bowyer shared images of poorly printed ballots , turning a documented technical problem into allegations of deliberate sabotage. Although an independent investigation found the error stemmed from faulty printers, Lake refused to accept the results and, with the help of Trump , further perpetuated another stolen-election myth.
Listen to this very carefully. Turning Point Action COO Tyler Bowyer called in from a polling center and had his ballot rejected because of printing issues. Here’s how he got his vote counted: https://t.co/xMlDjnp8Ap
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 8, 2022
Even Joe Rogan got in on the act, suggesting on a 2023 episode of his podcast that there appeared to be “ real fraud ” in Arizona around Lake’s defeat. Lake celebrated by praising Rogan for his “bravery.” She then went on to lose another election when she ran for Senate in Arizona in 2024, once again refusing to concede defeat.
Between a Trumpian local candidate repeatedly banging the drum of interference, Trump himself continually trying to relitigate 2020, and a rather slow vote-counting mechanism , Maricopa County has lived under a perpetual fog of conspiracy theories for the last six years.
Not that it’s kept that fog all to itself.
A startup incubator for electoral conspiracy theories
In 2021, other states began to use the Maricopa County model. Election-denial activists and Republican officials elsewhere seemed to view the Arizona Senate’s doomed audit of the 2020 election as a template for fomenting doubts about “integrity.” As nonprofit watchdog American Oversight reports , public records reveal Arizona activist Lyle Rapacki told associates in April 2021: “I have received communications from [a] Michigan Legislative leader wanting to know how they might proceed and I’ll pass along to [Cyber Ninjas CEO] Doug [Logan] said request.”
Soon enough, officials in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania also ordered Arizona-style audits challenging the 2020 results, leading to multimillion-dollar boondoggles .
Over the next few years, the playbook expanded. Lake’s fruitless efforts to replace voting machines with hand counts in 2022 gained traction in other states. Activists pressed officials in Pennsylvania, California, Nevada, and Texas to adopt hand-counting, often arguing that tabulators could be rigged despite lacking any evidence of machine fraud . The Guardian even opens its 2024 account of this effort with an anecdote about a disciple of MyPillow founder Mike Lindell rallying election deniers around hand-counting in—where else?—Maricopa County.
It’s unclear, though, why a movement partially predicated on the suspicious nature of Maricopa County’s sluggish pace at tallying ballots would opt for hand-counting, which is even slower .
After the 2024 election, Maricopa County’s Board of Supervisors commissioned new independent reviews of election procedures and technology . As the rumblings that have already emerged around foul play in the current midterms suggest, those reviews have done nothing yet to discourage Arizona “election integrity” enthusiasts from stirring the pot. Indeed, they are still finding innovative new ways to relitigate previous elections.
Back in June, for instance, images of Arizona primary-ballot envelopes from the 2022 midterm cycle made the rounds online with claims that their transparent windows exposed voters’ party affiliations, allowing nefarious Dem operatives to identify and discard GOP ballots. Never mind that those envelopes came with separate return envelopes that had no such windows.
Whether further conspiracies or audits follow this election remains to be seen, but suspicion and speculation feel practically inevitable. After all, “that’s just what happens in Maricopa County.”
