Once overlooked election administration roles like the secretary of state have also taken on a new significance since Mr Trump villainised the office holders who rejected his claims in swing states where he narrowly lost.

In most US states, the secretary of state is the chief election official, and oversees the voting procedures and ballot counting, as well as certifying election results.

Aware that the issue fires up his base, Mr Trump has continued to press his disputed claims of a stolen election whenever he appears in public.

He has centred his claims of voter fraud in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – all of which were decided for Mr Biden by fewer than three percentage points, but gave him a decisive lead in the all-important electoral college.

In Arizona, Michal Joyner, the 2nd vice chair of Maricopa County Republicans, said she found the 2020 election was still one of the first issues voters raised on the doorstep.  

“There’s a large segment of people that still feel that the [voting] machines were corrupt and that blank ballots were dropped off in the middle of the night – and they’re still talking about it,” she said.

Ms Joyner, who stressed that she did not speak for the state party, said that while she hoped Republicans could “move on” from the fallout of the 2020 election, she understood why Mr Trump kept returning to the theme.  

“It’s like throwing meat to the tigers – you have those people that are rabid about it,” she said.

The issue of voting fraud has permeated races for election administration positions across the US, according to the non-profit Brennan Centre for Justice.

In a report released this week, the Brennan Centre framed the current environment as “the first time in the modern era that questions about the legitimacy of elections have played such a prominent role in contests for election officials.”

In addition to Arizona, election denial has become a key campaign issue in five other battleground states with elections for secretary of state in 2022 – Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada and Wisconsin – according to the report.

And these candidates have an audience – according to a recent Axios-Momentive poll, only 55 per cent of Americans accept that Mr Biden legitimately won the 2020 election.

Such is the scepticism in some parts of Arizona, that some election deniers have taken matters into their own hands.