For nearly three decades, Buster Johnson served with little fanfare as a member of the Board of Supervisors in Mohave County, a deep-red section of western Arizona.

Even as former President Donald Trump pushed the false claim that widespread fraud was to blame for his loss in the 2020 election, the idea that such malfeasance had taken place in Mohave seemed laughable: Trump had carried the county by more than 50 points.

But that did little to stop the rise of election denialism in Mohave Country — and in the Republican Party at large.

Johnson, a lifelong Republican who previously was the vice chair of the party’s state chapter, said he was perplexed by the sudden pressure to implement new measures such as hand-counting each ballot.

That demand is common among election deniers, but experts say that the technique for tallying votes is more error-prone, less efficient and more expensive. Acceding to the wishes of his constituents, Johnson voted in favour of a measure to switch to hand-counting, but he tried to explain to voters in the county that such steps made little sense.

“This kind of thing never happened before 2020,” he said of the wave of new demands to overhaul the voting system.

“We’re a strong Republican County. We’ve always voted red.”

Johnson lost his re-election bid in the Republican primary in July to Sonny Borrelli, a state senator who had championed Trump’s false claims of widespread election “rigging” in 2020.

Borrelli, however, won an endorsement from Trump, the current Republican presidential candidate, who credited him with being “on the front line of fighting against corrupt elections since day one”.

Following Trump’s defeat in 2020, many Republican officials and candidates across the country — especially in swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada — embraced his false allegations of rampant election fraud.

In several cases, election deniers ran for statewide positions that would give them substantial influence over the electoral process.