‘WINNERS AND LOSERS’ — You may not have heard of Maricopa County, Ariz., Recorder Stephen Richer, who was defeated in a primary earlier this week. But his loss is reverberating across the political world, an ominous sign of a disease that continues to afflict the administration of American elections. Home to Phoenix, Maricopa County is Arizona’s largest jurisdiction and contains more people than 25 states. Since 2020, when Donald Trump refused to accept his defeat there, the county has emerged as an epicenter of conspiracy theories and unfounded ballot fraud accusations. Richer has also been one of the most vocal Republican critics of the “Big Lie,” the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump and his allies. And because of that, Richer lost his job on Tuesday. Richer was not preordained to play a central role in the fight against election misinformation, which in recent years has predominantly — but not exclusively — radiated from the Trumpified Republican Party. Before becoming Maricopa County’s top election administrator, Richer was a lawyer straight out of Republican central casting, with time served at AEI and the Cato Institute before running for public office. He ran against then-County Recorder Adrian Fontes in 2020 with deep criticisms of how the Democrat was running the office, resulting in more-than-a-little hurt feelings between the pair. But Richer’s narrow win was accompanied by a narrow loss for Trump, both in Arizona and nationally, sending the soon-to-be-former president and his supporters into a tailspin of lies about the security of American elections — many of them centered on Maricopa. Richer could have easily washed his hands of it, and heaped the blame on Fontes, who actually ran the office that was now under the microscope. Instead he — and the Republican-controlled county board of supervisors, which also oversees aspects of elections in an unusual split-duty system — vociferously defended the county through public attacks, including a sham “audit” run by amateurs with no prior experience. Richer continued to do so throughout his term, fending off conspiracy theories from effectively the entire Republican ticket in the state in 2022, including gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and secretary of state hopeful Mark Finchem. The bizarro world of Arizona politics ultimately led to Richer to quietly root for Fontes, the Democrat he defeated less than two years prior, to win his secretary of state race over Finchem. “I think some of the differences that he and I have, have become muted in that the conversation has just so materially shifted,” Richer told me in his office in February 2023. “It’s a playing field on whether or not the election was stolen in 2020 — and whether or not the election was stolen in 2022. We’re obviously on the same side.” With Fontes in the secretary of state’s office and Richer in the recorder’s office in the state’s largest county, the one-time rivals became a bipartisan odd couple willing to fight election deniers — and jovially argue about their political differences on a small speaking tour. But that bill, at least for Richer, came due Tuesday. The pessimist’s take here is obvious: The Big Lie’s hold isn’t weakening, at least among the Republican primary electorate in Arizona. Richer lost to state Rep. Justin Heap, who the Arizona Mirror writes “won’t say if Arizona’s elections were fair, but he’s voted like an election denier.” (Neither Heap nor Richer responded to interview requests this week.) Heap will face Democrat Tim Stringham in November. It turned out to be a rough evening for election defenders in Arizona, as VoteBeat notes : Lake won her Republican primary for Senate, albeit by an underwhelming margin. Finchem successfully primaried state Sen. Ken Bennett, a former secretary of state, who has “been the deciding vote blocking Republican proposals to restrict voting in the state, such as eliminating early voting or transitioning back to precinct-based voting.” Maricopa County Board of Supervisor Chair Jack Sellers, another Republican who prominently spoke out in the aftermath of 2020, also lost, and fellow Republican Supervisor Bill Gates, a former county commission chair, had previously decided to not seek reelection this year after suffering with PTSD for the violent threats he faced from election deniers. “Folks really understand now, especially in the political world, the value of [the recorder’s] office and how important it is to the overall system,” Fontes told me Thursday, saying he has already received calls from across the country about the race. The tens of thousands of Americans who help run this country’s elections aren’t asking to be lionized. They’re your neighbor just trying to put in an honest day’s work to help tens of millions of Americans exercise the most basic of fundamental rights. But it’s worth remembering that when faced with immense pressure, almost all of them, regardless of party, resisted efforts to disregard the results. Even after a blow like Arizona’s primary elections Tuesday, guardrails persist. In the 2022 midterms, election deniers — at least across swing states — were almost universally rejected for key roles. Many of the highest profile positions are occupied by “lowercase d” democrats from both parties who have already passed the test of history in 2020, ranging from Republicans like Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger and Pennsylvania’s Al Schmidt to Democrats like Fontes and Michigan’s Jocelyn Benson. Richer himself is leading by example. He will remain in office through the November election, and pledged to show his eventual successor the same “grace, class, professionalism, and selflessness” during the transition that Fontes showed him. “Elections have winners and, sadly, losers,” he wrote on X . “But that’s the name of the game. Accept it. Move on.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at zmontellaro@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @ZachMontellaro .
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