It is not yet clear who will be the next mayor of Los Angeles. Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker Source photographs by Getty

By late afternoon on Wednesday, a third of the state’s votes had yet to be reported. News crews massed in the lobby, filming them through a window. Tabulation was in full swing, with workers examining ballots in an inner room packed full of folding tables. The stakes were dramatic, but inside the center a businesslike scene unfolded. The race for the Senate, between the Democratic incumbent, Mark Kelly, and his far-right Republican challenger, Blake Masters, remained without a winner. The margin had narrowed in the gubernatorial contest, between the Republican Kari Lake, a Trump-supported election denier and former local-news anchor, and the Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs. Two key races were still too close to call. Several polling places had experienced technical difficulties, and, despite efforts to address them, “right-wing figures” were “amplifying explainable-if extremely frustrating-problems,” The New Yorker’s Clare Malone noted that afternoon.īottoms returned to the Center on Election Day and the day after, as the tally progressed. On Monday, Stephen Richer, Maricopa County’s Republican county recorder, spoke to voters and the press, working to counter conspiracy narratives about voter fraud. As the 2022 vote approached, state election officials had become the target of threats and harassment. Since then, electoral conspiracy theories have taken hold. In 2020, a mob of Trump supporters had gathered outside the facility and demanded to be let in, shouting at workers tallying votes inside and, in some cases, openly carrying guns. The day before the midterms, the photographer September Dawn Bottoms visited the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center, in Phoenix, Arizona. “They are trying to steal the election with bad Machines and DELAY. “People of Arizona: Don’t get out of line until you cast your vote,” Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. By early afternoon, one in three polling places in Maricopa County were having problems with election equipment. The Gateway Pundit predicted “wide-scale, multifaceted voter fraud” Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, said that “Stephen Richer and the entire Maricopa board of supervisors are a team of crooks and charlatans.” A swarm of national and international media were in town to observe how things unfolded. For months, right-wing activists and candidates had been stoking fears that the election might be rigged. The local officials running the election-Bill Gates, the chair of the county board of supervisors, and Stephen Richer, the county recorder-were already under enormous scrutiny. Across the country, Election Day tends to involve a certain amount of managed chaos-volunteers don’t show up for their shifts, or can’t figure out how to set up the printers-but these technical issues were cropping up in Maricopa County, which has been the epicenter of election conspiracies for the past two years.

The issues started just a few hours in: voters reported that the tabulators couldn’t read their ballots, first at a handful of polling places around Phoenix, then a few more.

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