Arizona Republican who said 2020 election was not stolen loses primary

PHOENIX — Republican voters on Tuesday ousted a top elections official in Arizona’s most populous county who angered conservatives by defending the state’s voting system against false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, according to The Associated Press.

The results as of early Wednesday showed that the official, Stephen Richer, had lost his primary reelection bid for Maricopa County recorder to state Rep. Justin Heap, a right-wing challenger buoyed by conservative voters’ distrust in elections and mail-in voting.

The campaign was a high-stakes contest between the Trump wing of Arizona’s Republican Party and establishment Republicans, with the potential to affect voting procedures in a county that encompasses Phoenix and its suburbs, and that often decides the state’s political direction.

As county recorder, Richer oversaw voter registration and mail-in voting, a once-obscure elections post that is now a battlefield for falsehoods about election fraud.

Richer campaigned as a conservative who had “cleaned up” voter rolls, made the office more transparent to the public and strengthened procedures for verifying voter signatures and tracking ballots. He was endorsed by former governors Jan Brewer and Doug Ducey, both Republicans.

But Republican voters slammed Richer when he said, correctly, that the election had not been stolen from former President Donald Trump. Shelby Busch, a Maricopa County Republican official, even suggested she would “lynch” Richer if he walked into a room with her.

Heap galvanized that anger and mistrust while not actually declaring whether he believed the 2020 election had been stolen. He said he would restore Republican voters’ confidence in the system. Another conservative Republican challenger, Don Hiatt, had flatly declared that the past two elections in Arizona were stolen.

Heap said the pace of vote counting and equipment failures, such as a printer error that snarled voting centers on Election Day in 2022, had made Arizona a “national laughingstock.” Richer pointed out that his office was not actually responsible for some of those problems.

Heap is now expected to face Timothy Stringham, a Democrat and military veteran, in the general election in November.

The fight over elections has been especially tense in Maricopa County, which is home to about 60% of Arizona’s population.

It was in Maricopa County that Republican Party officials voted to form a slate of “alternate electors” to keep Trump in office after he lost in 2020. Those efforts are now part of a sprawling state election interference investigation.

Republican state legislators ordered a partisan review of the 2020 results in Maricopa County in which counters sifted through paper ballots searching for traces of bamboo — tied to a conspiracy theory about foreign infiltration of the vote.

Richer was elected in 2020, defeating Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, who two years later was elected secretary of state, Arizona’s top elections official.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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