Aggregator

Colombia’s central bank faces a tough decision on interest rates as stubborn inflation supports another hike while weak economic data argue for a pause.

The websites of unknown origin are targeting key U.S. House races. They are getting picked up by ChatGPT's responses but Google's products avoid promoting them.

Moriarty said the situation shows that “the system for identifying misconduct and responding to it functioned well during the primary.”

Prices for candy, the most popular Halloween purchase, and gum have risen 7.7% in one year and are up more than 18% in two years, according to the latest federal data.

GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are one of the biggest biotech breakthroughs of the last decade. But to some clinical psychologists, they can represent something more sinister—a potential trigger for eating disorders. A new report suggests that the global incidence of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa shot up between 1990 and 2023—by a whopping 71%. By 2023,…

NPR member stations are gathering information for voters — from voter guides down to local races. Scroll through to find your state and the resources available from your local member station.

An NPR investigation finds that more than 15,000 military veterans were put into much-higher-cost home loans after the Trump administration cut a key program. Many now pay $1,000 more per month.

Republicans control 10 more state legislatures than Democrats. That's where most laws on taxes, abortion, crime and schools are made.

Israel's consequential election has ended in a deadlock, with neither side able to claim a majority, What happens now?

Critics say the tech entrepreneur's enormous wealth has given him too much political power. But when stacked up against other notable American moguls, historians say he's not unique.

Candidates across the U.S. have paid lip service to affordability issues. In Florida, the question of how to save voters money, and at what cost, is literally on the ballot.

Most kids say they use chatbots for help with homework and when they're stressed, lonely, or anxious. And how they use chatbots is tied to their mental health.

The competitive map for control of the U.S. Senate has expanded considerably in the final days before Election Day. Here's a ranking of those competitive races from most likely to flip to least likely.

While many young voters are focused on the cost of living in the election, for some from immigrant families, the political calculation — and their votes — is often about even more than the economy.

Hint: He likes them big (and he cannot lie).

In this episode, members of the InfoQ AI and ML editorial staff and friends of InfoQ discuss the current trends in the domain of AI, ML and Data Engineering. One of the regular features of InfoQ are the trends reports, which each focus on a different aspect of software dev. These reports provide the InfoQ readers and listeners with a high-level overview of the topics to pay attention to this year.

By Chip Huyen, Daniel Dominguez, Hien Luu, Arthur Casals

This InfoQ Trends Report offers readers a comprehensive overview of emerging trends and technologies in the areas of AI, ML, and Data Engineering. This report summarizes the InfoQ editorial team’s and external guests' view on the current trends in AI and ML technologies and what to look out for in the next 12 months.

By Srini Penchikala, Chip Huyen, Daniel Dominguez, Hien Luu, Arthur Casals

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.”

This article is republished with permission from Laser Wars, a newsletter about military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology.

Take a look at the photo above.

The image shows two U.S. Army soldiers, Spc. Caleb Mullens and Spc. Peterie Gage of the 2nd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, perched atop a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) near Rio Grande City, Texas, on August 31. According to the official U.S. Defense Department caption, the pair are inspecting an Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) system, a 20-kilowatt laser weapon currently operating at the southern border with Mexico under U.S. Northern Command’s Joint Task Force-Southern Border (JTF-SB).

To the best of my knowledge, Mullens and Gage are not laser physicists or optical engineers. They are likely regular U.S. service members, deployed to the border with standard-issue small arms, night vision goggles, concertina wire, and grit. And that’s exactly why this photo captures a major challenge ahead for the Pentagon’s plans to field laser weapon at scale: After spending half a century proving lasers can shoot down targets, military leaders must now ensure that junior enlisted troops can maintain and sustain them, day after day, without a clean room, a PhD, or the defense contractor that originally built them.

Military leaders know how critical maintenance and sustainment are for laser weapons. A U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) review of U.S. military directed-energy programs published in April 2023 listed maintainability as a central long-term challenge (alongside battle management, tactics, and user safety) to fielding laser weapons due to their technical complexity.

The root cause is a matter of physics: Because a laser weapon sends light through lenses and off mirrors, an errant speck of debris on an optic can absorb heat from the weapon and cause damage to the lens, which typically requires a specialized clean room for repairs. Unfortunately, combat zones and clean rooms don’t mix; indeed, one unidentified prototype directed-energy weapon fielded in an operational environment in recent years ran into battery charge and cooling problems and “had to be returned to the manufacturer in the United States for repairs,” according to the GAO report, a process which “reduced system availability, which is key to a successful weapon.”

“This is not a Humvee that’s sitting in the motor pool,” as then-U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command boss Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler said of laser weapons at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, in August 2023. “Many of the some of the main [laser] components . . . you’re not going to have a supply room or maintenance office full of repair parts. Those are going to be ones that are going to have to be built out.” To wit, Maj. Gen. Sean Gainey, then the director of the Pentagon’s Joint Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems Office, stated at the same event that the Army “had three or four systems in the [U.S. Africa Command area of responsibility] and essentially it takes three to make one.”

“We’ve got to work on maintainability because . . . we can’t get by with the thought of having clean rooms out in combat,” Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch, at the time the head of the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, said at a subsequent SMD symposium in August 2025.

For the now-diminished Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), “operational suitability” (which includes reliability, availability, maintainability, logistics supportability, manpower supportability, and training requirements, among other criteria) can determine whether a new system is adopted and fielded under a program of record.

Consider the Army’s experience with its 50-kw Stryker-mounted Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD) system. After four prototypes deployed to the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility in February 2024, then-Army acquisition chief Doug Bush told lawmakers that the systems’ power level was proving a challenge for a vehicle constantly on the move, citing “the heat dissipation, the amount of electronics, kind of the wear and tear of a vehicle in a tactical environment versus a fixed site.” The service ended up abandoning DE M-SHORAD in favor of the Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL) program, under which the service awarded defense contractor AV a $464.8 million production contract in September.

The Army is currently working to address maintainability and sustainability challenges through the E-HEL program by embracing a modular system architecture. The service’s 2024 solicitation for the effort explicitly asked defense contractors to “present opportunities for soldier-led maintenance activities and replacement of a major [high-energy laser] sub-system component,” as well as multiple line-replaceable units (LRUs) supporting field and sustainment maintenance in accordance with Army Regulation 750-1. Components like defense contractor Attalon’s new kWIC fiber disconnect are the kind of hardware that could actually make a laser weapon truly field-ready.

But the Army’s progress on this front remains uncertain. While E-HEL is supposed to “leverage” sustainment lessons from past efforts like DE M-SHORAD, Pentagon weapons testers never had a chance to fully evaluate the latter for operational suitability, namely because the CENTCOM deployment “prevented RCCTO from starting the scientific and technical testing planned for [fiscal year 2024],” according to DOT&E’s annual report on testing activities that year.

In addition, DOT&E said that the Army’s in-theater assessment was “not being conducted in accordance with a test plan, nor being observed by ATEC or DOT&E,” leaving testers with “insufficient data to assess DE M-SHORAD’s operational effectiveness, lethality, suitability, and survivability.” (To be fair, the U.S. military has certainly gathered some operational suitability data in the past. When the U.S. Air Force bought an additional Raytheon High Energy Laser Weapon System [HELWS] in December 2019 for an overseas field assessment, the contract included six months of in-theater maintenance training and the collection of availability, reliability, maintainability, and supportability data.)

In the near term, it appears that defense contractors will continue doing the heavy lifting for the U.S. military’s directed-energy maintenance and sustainment apparatus. The 2023 GAO report found that U.S. Navy operators of fielded directed-energy weapon prototypes like the low-power Optical Dazzling Interdictor, Navy (ODIN) and High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) “received a great deal of support from the DE weapon developers,” more than typical with new technology. Similarly, the Army’s Palletized High Energy Laser (P-HEL) system from BlueHalo (now part of AV) that deployed to CENTCOM starting in 2022 received a four-year logistics support contract in April 2024 “to provide preventive and corrective maintenance along with operator and maintenance team training.”

The AMP-HEL deployment to the southern border with Mexico is the closest thing the U.S. military has to a live maintenance and sustainment experiment for laser weapons, one that’s hopefully yielding data and lessons that prior efforts like DE M-SHORAD effort never produced.

And while firing off a laser beam into the night sky is no longer an insurmountable engineering obstacle for the U.S. military’s directed-energy ambitions, the photo from the border underscores a significant challenge ahead for their proliferation across combat formations: making sure that, when the damn things eventually break under real-world conditions, the average soldier can repair one with ease so it’s ready when they need it most.

This article is republished with permission from Laser Wars, a newsletter about military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology.

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.”