An Arizona Trump rally and voting rights march underscore the fight for democracy

The latter was out in full force on Saturday at former President Donald’s Trump’s first rally of 2022, in Florence, Arizona. Among the dozen or so Trump supporters there who spoke to CNN, grand conspiracy theories — all of which have been debunked — about how the 2020 election was supposedly rigged (like through voting machines linked to former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013) seem to have given way to more refined talking points that closely align with restrictive voting measures being enacted by Republicans across the country.

“There’s a famous statement — ‘sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate,’ ” Trump said in a video posted online Friday, underscoring how Republicans motivated by his election lies have sought to undermine the legitimacy of America’s elections. Arizona — which President Joe Biden carried in 2020, becoming the first Democrat to carry the state since 1996 — has been at the center of those efforts.

In Florence on Saturday, Trump showed exactly what kind of “vote counters” he approves of.

“I look forward to the day that we set aside an irredeemably flawed election. That’s the election of 2020. With all the evidence we have, the Arizona election should be decertified with cause by the legislature,” Finchem said, repeating the former President’s lies from the podium at his rally Saturday.

But also at the Trump rally was rare praise for a Democrat.

Sinema, along with Sen. Joe Machin of West Virginia, is blocking the passage of a pair of voting rights bills that Democrats hope could counter some of the restrictive voting measures enacted by Republicans at the state level. Sinema has said she is supportive of the bills but not in favor of changing Senate rules to get them passed.

The opposition of these two moderate Democrats is frustrating voting rights activists, including those who gathered in Arizona this weekend.

“She says she wants voting rights, but how do you want voting rights without creating a path for that to happen? That is inconsistent; that is unacceptable,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s son Martin Luther King III told CNN in Phoenix on Saturday.

The King family had traveled to Arizona to take part in a voting rights march, calling on Sinema to act — warning that history would not judge her kindly.

Hobbs said democracy had prevailed in 2020 because election officials on both sides of the aisle had done their jobs — but now, with Trump-endorsed election deniers running for jobs that would give them authority over elections, the future is less certain.

“The election in 2022, I think, is going to determine the future of our democracy,” Hobbs said.

That was a sentiment echoed by Yolanda Renee King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 13-year-old granddaughter, who was with her family this weekend in Phoenix, telling CNN, “I think it’s so important to vote and it’s so important to have the right to vote, because right now our country is at stake.”