And Arizona’s legislature set aside $530,000 in the final hours of its session for an “election integrity unit” in the office of the Republican attorney general, Mark Brnovich. He has said he will principally use the money not to hunt down illegal ballots, but to shoot down unfounded rumors of election theft.

Yet the battles over voting rules that have played out in recent months have followed a pattern: Restrictions are generally being loosened in Democratic states, but tightened in Republican-held states where voters’ loyalties seem increasingly up for grabs, like Texas, Florida and Arizona.

Arizona Republicans are hardly an endangered species; the party controls the governor’s office and both houses of the state legislature. But the state and its political preferences are shifting.

From 2000 to 2018, as the state’s overall population grew 40 percent, its Hispanic population nearly doubled, to nearly one in three Arizonans. And in the midterm elections in November, Democrats made inroads into Republicans’ political dominance. Besides taking one of Arizona’s seats in the United States Senate, they reclaimed a majority of the state’s nine congressional seats, elected the party’s first secretary of state since 1991, and came within two seats of winning control of the 60-member state House.

Voting rights advocates say they believe those results were the signal factor behind the bills to tighten voting rules this year. “Arizona is turning purple for sure — and in some cases, we may be turning blue,” Martín Quezada, a Democratic state senator from western Phoenix, said in an interview. “Those bills are all evidence of their intent to maintain the electorate as it is now.”

Republicans say their goal is to keep elections honest, and public faith in the results high. “If you’re going to manipulate the system, you’ve injected a sense of doubt into what happened with these ballots,” said Michelle Ugenti-Rita, a Republican state senator from the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale who was a prime sponsor of many of the party’s election bills. “And that kind of doubt is dangerous,” she said.