A year ago, Arizona provided one of the earliest signals that Republicans planned to launch a nationwide attack on voting rights and the American election system: It was there, in the state that handed former President Donald Trump his narrowest defeat in the 2020 election, that voting rights activists first sounded the alarms about a five-alarm fire that would soon engulf nearly every other state with a Republican-controlled legislature.

They were right then, and now the alarms are ringing again. Republican lawmakers there have already introduced at least 20 bills that seek to roll back voting rights by targeting mail-in ballot programs, or that otherwise seek to turn GOP conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and widespread voter fraud into state law.

In a bizarre, if not totally unexpected, twist, their crusade received a boost last week from the states most prominent Democrat: Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinemas decision to join 50 Republicans (and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia) to effectively kill a sweeping package of federal voting rights and democracy reforms in the U.S. Senate has paved the way for yet another Republican onslaught against the most basic tenets of democracy.

The failure of the bill, and Sinemas direct role in derailing a legislative push that might have thwarted many of the GOPs new laws, has left Arizona Democrats both smarting at one of their own, and fearful that Republicans will only take even more aggressive action to curtail voting rights and exert more partisan control over elections in its wake.

Disappointment is not strong enough of a word I was disgusted by it, Arizona state Sen. Martn Quezada, a Phoenix-area Democrat, said of Sinemas vote. Opportunities to actually make substantial change and to really change the status quo for the better ... are so few and far between. And if you dont embrace those opportunities and take advantage of that while you can, you could blow it for a generation of people that you serve.

The floodgates were already open, but now [Republicans] are empowered, he said. They know that there isnt a political will to stop them. I would expect that their efforts are going to get more aggressive and more outrageous.