Local authorities in an Arizona county in the western United States announced Monday that they had tightened security measures on the sidelines of midterm elections scheduled for Tuesday, promising “zero tolerance” against voter intimidation.
“If you choose to break the law, I have multiple cells waiting for you,” Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone said at a Monday news conference.
Armed men ‘loiter at early polls’
It is around this county of 4.5 million inhabitants that a large part of the -rejected- accusations of electoral fraud in 2020 were concentrated in this state where Joe Biden had passed in front of Donald Trump.
Since then, distrust in the voting system has only grown among Republican members of the region, with their main local candidates swallowing the accusations of fraud that Donald Trump has been spreading since he lost the presidential election, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. .
But that didn’t stop masked observers, some of whom were armed, from tracking down early ballot boxes, in an attempt they say was to prevent ballot box stuffing.
Paul Penzone said he would deploy plainclothes officers to guard polling stations and protect the transfer of ballot boxes. “I never thought in my life that we would put up physical barriers, fences, barbed wire to protect a building where a free vote is taking place,” he said.
Source: BFM TV
