Maricopa County, Arizona, Is Again Ground Zero of Election Conspiracy Theories

“More shenanigans at the Maricopa county ballot tabulation center,” Lake wrote on X. “Only through God’s intervention was this even discovered.”

But it wasn’t God who provided the video to the group. Jennifer Liewer, the deputy elections director for communications in Maricopa County tells WIRED that the clip was taken from a nonpublic backup livestream camera that is active but not currently one of the livestream cameras available on the county’s website. A source with knowledge of the matter who was not authorized to speak on the record tells WIRED that members of the We the People group had obtained the IP address for the camera years ago, allegedly allowing them to continue to monitor it. We the People did not respond to a request for comment.

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors issued a statement last week that debunked the claim, clarifying that the employees were “performing authorized and necessary work to update software and upload election data to a computer terminal that is not connected to the internet or ballot tabulation equipment.”

Unsatisfied with this explanation, Shelby Busch, the founder of We The People USA Alliance and a representative for the Republican National Committee (RNC), then contacted the Maricopa County recorder Justin Heap, who is aligned with Trump. His office then contacted the FBI to investigate the issue, according to Heap’s chief of staff.

The FBI asked an investigator from the Arizona attorney general’s office to investigate, and they quickly concluded there was nothing to investigate, according to a copy of their report seen by 12News. “Election integrity is one of the top priorities of this FBI, and we continue to work around the clock to pursue criminal actors who seek to undermine our system and the rule of law,” the FBI tells WIRED.

The RNC and Busch did not respond to a request for comment.

The FBI’s closed investigation has not quelled the conspiracy theories. On Thursday, Busch appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast repeating claims that something nefarious had happened, and that she had contacted the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice to investigate the matter further.

“Can somebody get involved here?” Bannon replied.

The Justice Department, DHS, and the White House did not respond to a request for comment.

“Election rumors contain the same, or very similar, narrative tropes that make them easily digestible for audiences and remixable for rumor producers,” says Starbird, whose group has created a bingo card of such tropes. “Maricopa County has become a trope, a suspicious setting, for election rumors. It’s a ready-to-use building block for a new rumor or conspiracy theory.”