It’s been four years since supporters of President-elect Donald Trump stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, under the false belief that the 2020 election was stolen. At the time, Maricopa County, Arizona, was ground zero for election conspiracies and disinformation — and its election workers were the targets of violent threats and harassment.
Former county supervisor Bill Gates was right in the middle of the mayhem. With anticipation and fears here of a repeat in the 2024 election, Scripps News was granted exclusive access as one of the largest voting jurisdictions in the country braced for the chaos that ultimately never arrived.
“I feel like there is something in the sort of DNA of this county, of this state, that goes back many decades,” Gates said. “There’s a distrust of authority. There’s a distrust of central government.”
A Republican for his whole career, Gates began to receive threats after the 2020 election. Those intensified when he became the chairman of the board and the face of elections during the 2022 midterm races.
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“Particularly having people in my own party questioning my integrity, questioning whether I was a good Republican and all that, it was very traumatic for me,” Gates explained. “In fact, I’ve been diagnosed with PTSD for it because of that incident, in addition to the death threats, the harassment.”
To protect election workers and voters, the Maricopa County Election and Tabulation Center (MCTEC) underwent major security upgrades ahead of the 2024 election, not wanting a repeat of 2020 — when an armed group surrounded the building, insisting the election was stolen. Barbed wire, fencing, concrete barriers and more surrounded the building this past election — officials not willing to take any chances.
On Election Day in November, Gates and his colleagues arrived at MCTEC prepared for whatever came their way. Gates spent the morning holding a press conference, doing interviews, monitoring logistics at voting locations, and reassuring the public that the election was safe and secure. Scripps News caught up with him around lunchtime to discuss the threats officials had seen so far--or lack thereof.
“Today, it's been good,” Gates said. “We haven't seen that at this point. We have been preparing for this day for months if not years. But so far, so good.”
One threat did come in during the evening, however. Scripps News was in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s command center when a bomb threat came into the County Recorder’s office. The Sheriff’s office determined the threat was a hoax but decided to block off the street and send law enforcement in to clear the area just in case.
The rest of election night proceeded without issue in Maricopa County. The next day, Scripps News met up with Gates to discuss the absence of chaos surrounding the election, a first for the county in several years.
“We had a very smooth election here,” Gates said. “A lot of attention. This is the beauty of federalism, it moves around. These key locations shift, even though we have close elections every four years, and that’s certainly what happened yesterday.”
The 2024 election is on track to usher in a peaceful transfer of power from President Joe Biden to President-elect Trump. But in the waning days of December during a visit to Washington, Gates still sees flickers of the election denial movement that may never extinguish.
“Because of what’s gone on for the last four years, all the misinformation that has been put out there, it's going to take us a long time until we can declare that election denialism is dead,” Gates told Scripps News about a month after election day during the Bipartisan Policy Center’s 2024 Election Summit. “What we’ve got to get back to is believing in the results, trusting the results, regardless of who has won. For the long-term survival of this democracy, we’ve got to get back to that, and the jury is still out on that.”
