in Arizona, Donald Trump’s supporters watch, sometimes armed, a ballot they already consider “rigged”

It is in a landscape of desert mountains, in full cowboy territory, in Camp Verde, two hours drive north of Phoenix, that we flush out a landmark of support for Donald Trump. At the entrance to a rodeo ground, caps “Make America great again“, the former president’s slogan, are on sale. On the eve of the midterm elections, these Republican voters are hoping to get their revenge here in Arizona. Joe Biden won this southwestern US state in 2020 by just 10,500 votes.

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These Republican voters for whom immigration is a major issue – they particularly want the construction of the wall promised by Donald Trump along the border with Mexico and stopped by his successor to be completed – announce a red wave in Arizona. They say they don’t trust the electoral process.

Despite all the investigations which concluded that there was no fraud, they are convinced that the last presidential election was stolen from them. “It was rigged”, a spectator tells us. Sone wife confesses to a loss of confidence in recent years.

On the radio, this theory of the illegitimate ballot goes round and round. Journalists talk about “deniers“, those who deny the result of the 2020 presidential election and who fuel suspicion for the 2022 elections during which American voters are called upon to renew the entire House of Representatives, more than a third of the Senate but also a part of the governors. Among these “deniers” include the main Republican candidates in Arizona dubbed by Donald Trump. And their supporters have decided to take them at their word. Between them they are called the “watchers”, of the observerswatchmen of a democracy under surveillance.

Mitch, 56, pro-Trump, does not lose sight of a large metal box in a parking lot, not far from Phoenix, a dropboxin which voters drop off their ballots.

“I monitor the ballot boxes every day from 5 p.m. to midnight. It’s so important not to cheat when you vote and that’s what happens…”

“I am unarmed but other lookouts have come here with weapons, he says, he kept them in their bags, they were not visible”. Mitch didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. A voter comes to drop off his ballot before our eyes. He too is a Republican but he does not tolerate these methods of surveillance: “They are paranoid, conspiracy theories are not for me.”

These conspiracy theories, some candidates openly trade in during this campaign. Like during this public meeting in Mesa, a suburb of Phoenix, during which Republican Liz Harris, who is running for a seat in the Arizona House of Representatives, said that if her side lost the election, only one explanation would be valid, according to her, “cheating”. And she already imagines the consequences: “It will not be a civil warshe promises, but a revolution.”

Liz Harris, who proudly wears a Trump 2020 T-shirt, publicly defends the thesis of a rigged presidential election, conveyed by the documentary 2,000 Slippers which finds a growing echo within conspiracy networks. The movie, she says, “shows very clearly that here in Arizona, there have been thousands of ballots cast at the ballot box in 2020 by the same people over and over again. Yes, elections are rigged in the United States. But they can no longer do that. The American people won’t accept it. Now people are watching. People are watching.”

Faced with these words of suspicion, the Phoenix Elections Department barricades itself. Its premises are surrounded by fences, topped with barbed wire. Inside, the counting began.