Armed guards at the gate and metal detectors at the door.

Snipers on the roof.

Drones in the sky.

Welcome to the front line of one of the nation’s key battleground states — a place where election workers not only drill on the finer points of counting ballots but also must be prepared to wield a fire hose, should the need arise to repel a mob once the votes are in.

Sounds like overkill, but this is Arizona 2024, where democracy has become a blood sport and the red, white and blue has given way to the red, white and black and blue.

Arizona election workers have been on high alert for four years, the victims of harassment and death threats.

All this, because Donald Trump proclaimed Arizona’s election stolen. The GOP-run state Senate promptly launched a months-long audit of Maricopa County’s vote — one run for and by Trump sympathizers.

One that showed our election wasn’t stolen.

Of course, that mattered not a whit to the politically and financially ambitious — the most loyal of Trump’s local sycophants who continued to scream to the rafters that, yes, Arizona’s election was stolen.

Then came 2022 and it was rinse and repeat, this time with Kari Lake charging forth in outrage once the votes for governor were counted and she didn’t win. (She went on to lose not one but two trials after presenting her........

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