Arizona county official who took on election skeptics loses primary

PHOENIX - A top Republican election official in Arizona’s most populous county known for his vigorous defense of elections lost his primary election Tuesday to a state lawmaker who called elections in the county “a laughingstock.”

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who faced death threats and endless harassment for doing his job, lost his reelection bid to state Rep. Justin Heap, an attorney aligned with the state legislature’s ultraconservative Freedom Caucus. Heap has voted for legislation that grew out of false election theories and was endorsed by Kari Lake, the U.S. Senate candidate with a large following who routinely spreads misinformation about elections and has been highly critical of Richer.

As Heap campaigned for the job, he pledged to try to improve confidence in elections and engage with the public in a respectful manner.

“It has become clear that ensuring the right of every citizen to have confidence in their vote, regardless of party, has become the civil rights issue of our time,” Heap said during a June debate. “Unfortunately, our current county recorder has taken a different path, a path that disrespects and demeans the voters. A path that attacks anyone who criticizes his office and laughs off even the suggestion that there might be anything wrong with our election system.”

Richer congratulated Heap on his win Wednesday morning, writing on X: “Elections have winners and, sadly, losers. And in this one, it looks like I’m going to end up on the losing side of the column. But that’s the name of the game. Accept it. Move on.”

In the November general election, Heap will face Democrat Tim Stringham, a U.S. Army and Navy veteran and political newcomer who is campaigning on a promise to “safeguard our elections” and “ensure that each eligible citizen gets to vote in a safe, secure and convenient way and that each vote will be counted fairly and transparently.”

If Heap wins in November, he could dramatically reshape how elections are run in the county, a fiercely contested battleground where former president Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election four years ago inspired profound mistrust among many Republicans about elections and government institutions. That movement sparked a rush of new involvement and activated pro-Trump voters determined to oust local officials who defend election results they don’t like, including Richer and members of the county governing board. Richer will continue to help run the upcoming presidential election, then leave office next year.

When Trump narrowly lost to President Biden in Arizona in 2020, he and his supporters quickly hyper-focused on Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and more than half of the swing state’s voters. Through emissaries, phone calls and text message, they sought to halt vote-counting and then tried to undermine the results. Republicans on the county board of supervisors who signed off on the results faced death threats and were called treasonous. A mob of protesters showed up at the home of one supervisor. Soon after, Richer took office.

Of the three remaining Republicans who were on the board in 2020, two decided not to run for reelection and a third lost his primary on Tuesday. The Republicans running for those seats have said they would work to make elections more transparent. One of those Republicans, Trump-endorsed Rep. Debbie Lesko, voted against accepting the 2020 election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania on Jan. 6, 2021. Another has advocated for getting rid of precinct-based voting and emergency ballot drop boxes.

Republican county attorney Rachel Mitchell, who has told members of her own party that Biden won the 2020 vote and that the 2022 elections in the state were accurate and legitimate, easily won her race against a further-right candidate. And a GOP supervisor, who joined the board after the 2020 election and was called a “traitor” for defending the validity of electoral outcomes, won his reelection. The general election race for county recorder is expected to be competitive, political analysts say.

Richer and the Republican supervisors shared election responsibilities and generally shared a similar vision on how voting should be run, how votes should be counted and how election employees should be defended. New leaders could take the county in a radically different direction.

Richer was endorsed by several traditional Republicans, including former governors Doug Ducey and Jan Brewer.

“For being the ‘establishment candidate,’ having the county party, the state party, Turning Point USA, Lake-world, Trump-world all against me - that’s hard to run against,” Richer said in an interview shortly before results began posting.

Richer, an attorney, assumed the once-sleepy job of helping run elections and recording documents in 2021, after he beat the Democratic incumbent in the 2020 election. He stepped into the job as Trump, his allies and supporters tried to overturn the former president’s 10,457-vote defeat and then turned against county and state Republicans who refused. Richer had nothing to do with the administration of that presidential election but took heat for it, anyway.

In that environment, Richer began sharing his view from inside of the recorder’s office in downtown Phoenix in the hopes of making it easier to understand complex voting rules and procedures.

Like an FAQ come to life, Richer threw himself into trying to make elections less mysterious, blasting out social media posts that fact-checked people who amplified misinformation - treating everyday constituents and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, all the same. Richer gave tours of the county’s vote-county operation, taking the curious into the bowels of the process and explaining how he kept voter rolls updated.

His approach drew praise from national election officials but ire from further-right Republicans who viewed him as dismissive of their concerns. Richer found himself in the eye of attacks after the 2022 midterm general election, when printer malfunctions at dozens of voting sites caused confusion and inconvenienced some voters. Lake, who lost her campaign for governor that year by about 17,000 votes, falsely claimed that Richer deliberately rigged the election to prevent her from winning. Death threats and harassment followed.

In a rare move, Richer sued Lake for defamation in June 2023, saying he saw a direct link between her rhetoric and threats against him. Lake has declined to defend herself against the lawsuit and asked a judge to begin the process of assessing damages.

Christine Jones, a Republican attorney and former GOP candidate who closely follows the state’s elections, said two things weighed against Richer with primary voters.

“His tone: He’s a little sarcastic and a little snarky and some of that is defensive because he was attacked and had death threats,” she said. “The second thing: He sued Kari Lake for defamation, which had the effect of pitting more than half of Republican primary voters against him.”

As he ran for reelection, Richer campaigned at events hosted by grass-roots Republicans - the type of forums his GOP colleagues at the county stopped attending after they gave way to shouting by those who wanted confrontations. Richer himself was sometimes heckled or booed. In March, a vice chair of the Maricopa County Republican Committee told a crowd that she would “lynch” Richer if he walked in the room. She later described her comment as a joke.

In the final stretch of the campaign, Richer handed his GOP rivals a gift, telling reporters that he would vote for Biden, not Trump, in November. His comments came before Biden’s June 27 shaky debate performance and eventual withdrawal from the race.

“DID YOU KNOW that the current fake-Republican County Recorder, Stephen Richer, has admitted he’s voting for Joe Biden,” Heap wrote on X on June 28. He continued, “Say NO to Stephen Richer & Joe Biden’s epic failures.”