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Earlier this month, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican who oversees mail-in voting, voter registration, and property records in America’s fourth-largest county, reached out to Elon Musk with an invitation.
“Can I please give you a tour of our election facility and mail voting process,” he wrote on Musk’s social-media platform, X, after the red-pilled billionaire declared that “electronic voting machines” and “anything mailed in” were “too risky” to use in elections.
“You can go into all the rooms,” Richer continued. ”You can examine all the equipment. You can ask any question you want. We’d love to show you the security steps already in place, which I think are very sound.”
For three-and-a-half years, Richer has been asking skeptical Republicans just to hear him out about how elections really work in the most closely contested county in the nation’s most closely contested state. First elected in 2020 amid right-wing fears about George Soros, Richer, a Federalist Society lawyer, emerged as one of the nation’s most outspoken voices against the myth of stolen outcomes. He held the line against election deniers such as Kari Lake (who Richer is currently suing for defamation) while attempting to make the election process as transparent as possible. Richer opened the doors to the county’s Tabulation and Election Center for more than 150 tours, turned the security cameras on 24/7 for people to watch at home, and tirelessly fielded questions on Musk’s platform—all while facing a stream of violent threats and criticism.
But it turned out that good cheer and transparency could only accomplish so much. Musk, for one, did not take Richer up on the offer. And on Tuesday, Richer finally ran out of time to change his fellow Republicans’ minds: He lost his primary to state Rep. Justin Heap, a member of legislature’s Freedom Caucus, who was backed by many of the state’s most prominent election deniers. The single-digit margin only tells a part of the story; with another Richer critic running a strong third, just 36 percent of Republican voters backed the incumbent.
Heap managed to never say whether he thought the 2020 or 2022 elections were stolen during his campaign. But he didn’t really have to. To understand what he represented and why he was running, you only had to look at the endorsements he racked up from many of the biggest names in what Richer has called Arizona’s “cottage industry” of election denial.
Chief among those backers was Lake, who ran for governor in 2022 while calling for her Democratic opponent to be imprisoned for the 2020 presidential election to be “decertified,” and is still—still!—attempting to get a court to declare her the winner of a race she lost by 17,000 votes. Lake—who in her memoir described a lengthy dream sequence she had about being kidnapped by Richer, taken to the desert, and nearly murdered—is now the Republican nominee for US Senate.
Another prominent supporter was Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer for Turning Point Action, who was indicted in April for his role in the 2020 fake elector scheme. Heap had the support of Arizona Reps. Paul Gosar (who coordinated with “Stop the Steal” leaders on January 6th), and Andy Biggs (who tried to round up support for the state’s fake electors in the run-up to the Electoral College certification). As the Arizona Mirror reported in April, one of the people who nudged Heap into running was his colleague in the statehouse, state Rep. Jake Hoffman—another fake elector.
The vitriol Richer faced from current party leaders was intense. Earlier this year, Shelby Busch, the vice chair of the Maricopa County Republican party told an audience that if it was up to her, she “would lynch” Richer. Busch, who later said that she was joking, went on to lead the state party’s delegation to the Republican National Convention.
Because of the way elections are run in the county, a new recorder can’t just rewrite the rules on his own terms. The Board of Supervisors is responsible for tabulation and election-day voting, for instance, and the state’s vote-by-mail system and use of electronic voting machines are set by statute. But notably, Heap has voted to get rid of both of those things, while also voting to mandate hand-counts. (At the same time, Heap is running to be Recorder on the promise of speeding up the counting of votes, which a hand count is not likely to accomplish.)
With support from independents and hard-earned respect from some Democrats, Richer was in a decent position to win a second term if he managed to survive the primary. One Indivisible activist from Scottsdale, who took an election-facility tour with Richer, told me that Richer was going to be the first Republican she ever voted for. But Heap’s victory is far from guaranteed in a county where Democrats have won a succession of key races by appealing to independents and moderate Republicans. On Tuesday, Democrats nominated Tim Stringham, an Army and Navy veteran who previously served as a JAG attorney.
When we spoke in June, Stringham told me that he had entered the race reluctantly, after being nudged by the county Democratic party. But he cited Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a pivotal moment in his decision to become more involved in politics.
“And as a veteran, somebody who’s gone 10,000 miles and risked being blown up to defend democracy, you start feeling a little bit silly. My wife is back in Arizona, what the hell am I doing?”
“Watching on TV, and being like, holy cow, the President of the United States is really trying to overthrow the republic here,” Stringham said. “And I always tell people that it’s like, you know, if there’s just a riot, there’s just a riot, those things happen. But somebody actually handed fake electoral votes to Mike Pence and said we want you to read these votes. They no-shit tried to overthrow the Constitution. And as a veteran, somebody who’s gone 10,000 miles and risked being blown up to defend democracy, you start feeling a little bit silly.”
“‘My wife is back in Arizona, what the hell am I doing?,'” he said, recalling his thought process at the time. “‘I’m clearly not in the right place to actually protect American democracy.'”
Stringham did not believe there was a “huge philosophical difference” between he and Richer on how the recorder’s office was run, but he was adamant about wanting to preserve the availability of ballot drop-boxes and protect vote-by-mail from Republican legislators’ attempts to end it.
The incumbent’s defeat is a setback for election officials who have faced threats and tried to clarify the process amid a deluge of misinformation. Scores of election workers across the country, and particularly in Arizona, are leaving their jobs in part due to the added strain of dealing with sometimes-armed conspiracy theorists and endless lawsuits. In Maricopa, Republican county supervisor Bill Gates, who joined Richer in defending the election process in 2022, chose not to run for re-election this year and has talked publicly about suffering from PTSD. Another Republican supervisor who has been a target of election deniers, Jack Sellers, lost his primary on Tuesday too. It’s tough to see how things might have played out differently in recent years if the people screaming about stopping the steal also had allies in some of the most important election administration positions in the land. But it probably wouldn’t have been great.
Richer’s loss won’t, at least, have much of an effect on how the 2024 election is conducted. The recorder’s term won’t end until January—meaning that the lame-duck Republican will still be around to do one last job this November.
