As Donald Trump dangles the possibility of running for president again in 2024, his refusal to accept the outcome of his last presidential bid has seeded copycat candidates across the United States.
Hundreds of Republicans running in the midterm elections have subtly and explicitly echoed the former president's false claims that the 2020 race was "rigged".
Few have done so more enthusiastically than Arizona's Kari Lake.
"It was a debacle," Ms Lake, who is running for governor, said in June.
"It was stolen, it was corrupt and rotten to the core, and I will continue to say that until my last dying breath.
"The election of 2020 was stolen from us."
The Trump-backed former local news anchor is known for using flattering TV lighting and spouting outlandish conspiracy theories.
At a slick campaign rally, the weekend before the 2022 midterm elections, Ms Lake projected confidence.
"We're gonna rip them to shreds," she told the crowd in Phoenix, Arizona's capital, referring to her political enemies.
"On November 8, they are going down."
Ms Lake has made clear that, if she wins the gubernatorial race, she plans to work with state lawmakers to rewrite electoral laws to "secure the vote" — one of many of Trump talking points to which she has added her own flair.
And, despite once being deemed unelectable, polls now have her slightly ahead of her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs.
According to FiveThirtyEight, 60 per cent of Americans will have the chance to vote for an election denier — a person who questions or denies the legitimacy of the 2020 election — on November 8.
The majority of Republicans running for seats in the US House of Representatives and Senate now fit that category, as do many of those eyeing key state posts, including governor, secretary of state and attorney-general.
In Arizona, a swing state that was once considered Republican heartland but handed Joe Biden a narrow victory two years ago, the stakes are particularly high.
With early voting now underway, there have already been multiple reports of vigilante "poll watchers", dressed in tactical gear, staking out ballot boxes.
And, since 2020, when Maricopa County became the focal point of conspiracists convinced of a plot by Democrats to "steal" the White House, local officials from both parties have received death threats.
Who is Kari Lake?
At her penultimate rally before election day, Kari Lake — who rose to fame on the local Fox affiliate station — railed against the media assembled, calling them "fake news".
The event was held in a barn about 45 minutes' drive from the centre of Phoenix and featured a procession of Republican candidates revving up the crowd from a stage adorned by oversized American and Arizonan flags.
Among the candidates was Blake Masters, a former venture capitalist now running for the US Senate against a Democrat incumbent, former astronaut Mark Kelly.
He oozed confidence and Make America Great Again (MAGA) rhetoric, but it was clear Ms Lake was the star of the show.
Her supporters cheered as she was introduced, then responded to each line — from calls for an investigation into Democrats' COVID-19 response to attacks on "open borders" — like a well-rehearsed studio audience.
At one point, she encouraged the crowd to "stand up, turn around and raise your hand if you're not listening to the fake news", gesturing to the TV cameras at the back of the room.
Ms Lake — who one former colleague described as once "liberal to her core" — hasn't just pinched the former president's script, she's also leaned on high-profile supporters from his inner circle.
Her special guest at the rally was Mr Trump's former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who heaped praise on her and said a Republican victory in Arizona would send a message "not just to Washington DC, but to Berlin, Beijing, London, all of them."
The first hint of Ms Lake's political transformation aired on election night 2020 when she was co-anchoring the coverage and resisted calling Arizona for Joe Biden.
That whisper of election denialism has since become a roar.
Not only has she continued to push the "Big Lie", but she has also refused to say she will accept her own potential defeat in the governor's race.
"I'm not losing to Katie Hobbs. We have a movement. We are not losing to Katie Hobbs, so don't worry about it," she said on a right-wing podcast in September.
When she recently offered a similar refrain on CNN, veteran journalist Dana Bash pushed for more.
"If you lose, will you accept that?" Ms Bash asked.
"I'm going to win the election and I will accept that result," Ms Lake replied, repeating her first answer almost word for word.
On social media and on the campaign trail, Ms Lake has none of the pretence, vowing to de-certify the 2020 election if elected governor.
She also embraces comparisons to the former president, saying often: "You can call me Trump in a dress any day".
And her boisterous, Trump-style rallies have overshadowed Katie Hobbs's low-key policy roundtables and grassroots efforts to appeal to independent voters on issues such as abortion rights.
Ms Hobbs, who is currently serving as secretary of state, making her Arizona's top election official, has been scathing of her rival.
"I stood for democracy when I refused to surrender to the insurrectionist who surrounded my home after I certified the 2020 election. And I'm still doing it today in this race for governor," she said at a recent campaign event.
"Not just because I'm running against a Trump-endorsed, election-denying, media-hating, conspiracy-loving, chaos-causing, spectacle-seeking Kari Lake.
"But because, when we prove government can help solve problems, we prove that democracy works."
How Arizona became the home of election denialism
Following the 2020 election, Maricopa County became ground zero for election denialism as partisan election audits dragged on for months.
Mr Trump lost the county — the fourth-largest in the country, which includes the cities of Phoenix and Mesa — by nearly 50,000 votes, but he lost Arizona by only around 10,457.
The thin margin led Maricopa County's Republican recorder, Stephen Richer, to order an initial hand recount of more than 47,000 ballots, followed by testing voting machines.
In both instances, the results were deemed accurate.
Amid continued pressure from the Republican state officials, the county's board of supervisors hired two third-party election technology companies to check the machines, which were twice found to be sound.
The process took nearly three weeks and was live-streamed, but the sceptics still weren't satisfied.
Then, Cyber Ninjas — a controversial computer security firm backed by the Arizona Senate — seized 2.1 million ballots after a protracted legal battle and trucked them to an old sports arena to review, fuelling anger and conspiracies among Trump supporters.
The results of the review have been widely derided and rebuked by the county board of elections, but the damage was done.
"Nobody stole Maricopa County's election," Mr Richer wrote in an open letter shared on social media.
"Elections in Maricopa County aren't rigged."
Several activists tied to right-wing groups were accused of conspiring to intimidate voters by filming ballot boxes — sometimes while armed — in a recent federal lawsuit.
In a statement, the Justice Department wrote the allegations "raise serious concerns", adding that "vigilante ballot security efforts" likely violate the federal Voting Rights Act.
In Arizona, Democrats’ fears for democracy fail to cut through
In a recent prime-time address, President Joe Biden condemned political violence and voter intimidation, expressing dismay over the recent attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
"The 'Big Lie' has been proven to be just that: a big lie, every single time," Mr Biden said from Union Station in Washington DC.
"Yet now, extreme MAGA Republicans aim to question not only the legitimacy of past elections, but elections being held now and into the future."
The president's plea to voters to vote to protect democratic norms has been repeated by several Democratic candidates campaigning around the country.
But with Republicans "favoured" to take back control of the House, and the Senate now a "toss up", according to forecasters FiveThirtyEight, the lofty messaging may not be resonating with voters, with the economy consistently topping their lists of concerns.
Two days before election day, Arizona was hosting a different kind of race: the NASCAR championships.
The crowd at Phoenix Raceway was dotted with red Make America Great Again T-shirts and hats, with many people expressing support for Kari Lake, who courted voters at the car-racing event.
One attendee, Jason Kahn, said he planned to vote for her, even though he doesn't believe the 2020 election was stolen.
"I think that's her biggest downfall," he said.
"I think anyone who really truly believes the election was stolen is a nut case."
Even so, he said he admired her toughness.
"She's gonna stand up for people. I think working people think that she's gonna stand up for them."
Another attendee, Carrie McCarty, said many Arizonans sincerely believe the last election was stolen, despite no evidence of widespread election fraud emerging after two years and multiple investigations.
"I think there was some mishandling of ballots," she said.
"I don't think the votes were accurate. I think things were tampered with. And I think the Democrats are playing dirty."
Trump's influence goes beyond Arizona — and beyond midterms
According to the New York Times, more than 320 candidates in the midterm elections have aired concerns about — or outright denied — the outcome of the 2020 election, without evidence.
That scepticism, based on false claims of widespread election fraud, has spawned a movement that's now become mainstream within the Republican Party.
Subtler forms of election denialism include the use of loaded phrases such as "election integrity" and "ballot harvesting" to cast a shadow of doubt over results.
But many Republicans now proudly say the quiet part out loud.
In Wisconsin, gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels told supporters that, if he's elected, his party will "never lose another election" in the state again — a comment his opponent, Democratic Governor Tony Evers, labelled a "threat to democracy".
Senator Ron Johnson, another Wisconsin Republican who has repeatedly downplayed the violence of January 6, said he'll "see what happens" when asked if he would accept the outcome of the midterms.
"I mean, is something going to happen on election day?" he asked.
"Do Democrats have something up their sleeves?"
Both those races — and many others — remain extremely close.
In Pennsylvania, MAGA Republican Doug Mastriano — who chartered a bus to the Capitol on January 6 — has fared far better than many expected.
And in Michigan, Tudor Dixon, another former TV personality, invoked a conspiracy that the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests were part of a Democratic plan to "topple" the United States as revenge for the civil war.
Even in Democratic strongholds New York and Oregon, Republicans have made gains in gubernatorial races that many thought were unwinnable.
The midterm elections are the biggest test of US electoral systems since 2020 and they will set the stage — for better or worse — for 2024.
Lilliana Mason, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins who studies the roots of political extremism in regular US citizens, says she is "extremely worried" about the ongoing threats to US democracy.
She said it wouldn't be possible to know if the country is "out of the woods", at least for the time being, until January 6, 2025.
"That's when we're going to know whether or not all of these efforts to undermine democracy have succeeded," Dr Mason said.
"Part of the reason we should be paying attention to these current midterm elections is that they're going to put in place the people who will be in charge of certifying the 2024 election."
By vying for and winning local and state offices that play crucial roles in elections, MAGA Republicans could arguably put themselves in the position to influence the outcome.
In most states, the secretary of state oversees elections and certifies the results of presidential elections, while governors pick the slate of electors that determine the winner in their state.
Dr Mason likened the approach to a slow-moving "legal coup".
"It's not a violent event like January 6, [2021]. Instead, it's: 'Let's prevent that violent event from ever occurring by having the people in the states — say, state legislators and election officials — just never agree to certify the election at all.'
"So, it's not that the 2022 election is the place where I think everything's going to get the most dangerous, I think it's going to set the stage for potential danger later on."
