“Maricopa is a very, very dishonest county,” President Donald Trump told reporters last week.

One could be forgiven for thinking that you had time-traveled back to the chaotic weeks and months following the 2020 presidential election, when Arizona's Maricopa County became the focal point for the election denial movement.

But Maricopa, and election deniers, are back. With just over two weeks to go before the midterms, extremist election activists are trying to undermine trust in the voting process and are ramping up their efforts to confuse and scare people. Central to this is to fall back on well-known tropes that have been used in the past, including the idea that Maricopa County is somehow corrupt.

“At this point, people are tuned into Maricopa as a focus of election rumors,” Kate Starbird, cofounder of the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, tells WIRED. “Sharpie pens bleeding through ballots in 2020. Tabulator machines not reading ballots in 2022. Maricopa has become a familiar setting, a place where election issues arise or are perceived to arise, and where those issues get wrapped into ‘rigged election’ conspiracy theories.”

No evidence of widespread voter fraud in Maricopa County has ever been found, but in March of this year, the administration refocused attention on the county when the FBI seized dozens of hard drives and servers containing data from the Cyber Ninjas audit. The attention was intensified last week, when Trump told reporters that election officials in the county should “be ashamed of themselves” after 3,000 ballots were mailed early in error.

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