In Nation’s Largest Swing County, Election Deniers Move Closer to Taking Over Elections

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Democrat Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, the elections head in Arizona’s Pima County, says she drove to work in silence on Wednesday morning, after her counterpart in Maricopa County, Republican Stephen Richer, lost his primary to a far-right challenger.

“Are you allowed to print expletives?” she told Bolts.

Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and 4.5 million residents, is the nation’s most populous swing county—and it’s lately seen a torrent of right-wing activism pushing false claims about recent elections. Richer, who came into office in 2021, relentlessly defended how elections are run in the county, taking it upon himself to constantly debunk unfounded claims—pushed by everyone from Arizona politicians to Elon Musk—that fraud is rampant and results are rigged. 

He faced persistent harassment and criticism from fellow Republicans for this stance, and even got death threats; one local Republican, who chaired Arizona’s delegation at last month’s Republican National Convention, said she wanted to “lynch” Richer. 

He was ousted on Tuesday in the GOP primary by state representative Justin Heap, who drew support from some of the country’s most vocal election deniers, and whose campaign was led by an indicted 2020 “fake elector” for Donald Trump. Heap beat Richer by about seven percentage points and moves on to face Democrat Timothy Stringham in the general election. 

“This November, we will end the laughingstock elections that have plagued our county, state and nation,” Heap posted on the social media platform X after his win.

Arizona’s elections infrastructure has largely held up since 2020 amid a barrage of Trumpian lawsuits and extensive organizing by conservatives who falsely say that state elections are stolen from them. But the Arizona primaries underscored the potency in Republican politics of the false narrative that elections can’t be trusted—and that something drastic has to be done about it.

Heap’s was one in a string of big GOP primary wins on Tuesday for candidates who have baselessly cast doubt on elections. 

Republicans Kari Lake, Abe Hamadeh, and Mark Finchem, all of whom lost statewide races in 2022 and then refused to concede, won congressional and legislative primaries. A rare Republican senator who had opposed new restrictions on voting in the state’s most recent session lost his reelection bid. Wendy Rogers, another senator who is a member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group, beat back a more moderate challenger. In Yuma County, just west of Maricopa County, a county recorder who has resisted election conspiracies lost to a staunch election denier.

And in Maricopa County, primary results left the local elections system several steps closer to falling in the hands of Republicans who have echoed Trumpian lies.

Jack Sellers, the Republican chair of the county board, the body that certifies local election results, lost by a large margin to Mark Stewart, a Chandler city councilor who has refused to say if he’d have certified the results of recent elections. Debbie Lesko, a U.S. representative who voted to overturn the results of the presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021,, won the GOP primary for an open seat on the board.

Some of these candidates are likely to coast in November because they’re running in conservative areas. The general elections will be highly competitive for others. 

Maricopa County Democrats have a strong chance of flipping the recorder’s office by defeating Heap; they are also likely to target Stewart in a competitive district within Maricopa County. 

These contests won’t affect how elections are run this fall, since none of the winners will be seated until next year. But they’ll shape who will run, count, and certify elections in this state starting next year, at least through the 2026 midterm election and the 2028 presidential election.

U.S. states vary widely in their respective approaches to election administration. Even within Arizona there is variance. Maricopa County’s approach is to split the job between the county recorder and its county board: The recorder oversees voter registration and mail voting, while the elected board of supervisors oversees voting on Election Day and vote tabulation, then certifies the results of the election.

In these roles, Richer and the county supervisors found themselves on the frontlines against election deniers. The supervisors indulged conspiracy theorists after 2020 by ordering an audit that turned up nothing. But they then partnered with Richer to reject these allegations, standing unanimously by him in certifying the results of the 2022 midterm elections, over much Republican outcry. 

“This is a war between good and evil, and you all are on the side of evil,” a right-wing organizer told the board during the certification meeting, which was marked by other angry outbursts. 

All five seats on the board are up for election this year. Lesko and Stewart’s victories in the county’s first and fourth districts mark gains for the far right, but candidates aligned with election deniers failed to win Republican primaries in the second and third districts; their biggest failure of the night came when Supervisor Thomas Galvin survived against a Lake-endorsed challenger, Michelle Ugenti-Rita. An election denier also secured the GOP nomination in the fifth district, but that area is staunchly Democratic. 

This means that candidates who have openly signaled a willingness to stall election certification are unlikely to claim an outright majority on the board this fall.

Still, a scenario in which multiple supervisors vote to reject certification, and give voice to baseless allegations of fraud in an official setting, may give new ammunition to lawsuits by election deniers—and calls for new legislation by their statehouse allies.

Elections experts in Arizona believe that sufficient backstops exist—in state law, in the judiciary, and in key statewide offices held by Democrats—to prevent local officials from single-handedly undoing legitimate election results in the future. 

But Trump-aligned lawyers in the past have theorized that they’d be able to weaponize any chaos created by local officials during the process of counting and certifying presidential results, encouraging their allies to foster a “cloud of confusion.” 

“When you’re talking about literally millions of people, tabulating their results, accounting for them, tracking them, in a very ridiculously short period of time, that is a complicated piece of machinery,” said Jim Barton, a Democratic elections attorney based in Arizona. “When you have people who don’t know what they’re doing making rules about it and interfering with it, it can throw sand in the gears of this finely tuned system.”

Arizona has experienced such gear-grinding. Officials in some counties have pushed for hand counting of ballots, a priority for conservatives who say without evidence that voting machines are unreliable and easily rigged. These officials have also sought to delay election certification in some cases. 

Election experts also say they’re anxious about the ability of local leaders to make voting harder or more confusing. Recorders cannot unilaterally remove existing voting options, or just boot eligible voters from the rolls. But they run and staff various voter services, oversee public outreach and education, handle public records requests, and determine how—or whether—to assist people who need help to register or to obtain a ballot.

If he becomes the chief elections official In Maricopa County, Heap has promised to “clean the voter rolls,” alleging that Richer has failed to properly regulate voter registration. There is no evidence that Richer’s office has allowed ballot access to ineligible people.

Heap has dodged questions about whether he thinks the results of the 2020 and 2022 elections are accurate. In the statehouse, he’s part of the far-right Freedom Caucus, which has championed major changes to election laws. He supported legislation to ban most early-voting options in the state and encourage hand-counting of ballots.

Heap has said he was recruited to run for the position by state Senator Jake Hoffman, who is facing felony charges for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Hoffman served as chief strategist during this campaign, Heap said.

The general election between Heap and Stringham, a Democrat who vows to defend voting rights, is likely to be very competitive in this swing county. Richer in 2020 won with a margin of just 0.3 percent against Democrat Adrian Fontes, who then went on to carry the county two years later on his way to becoming Arizona’s secretary of state.

Beyond Fontes’ race, Republicans generally and unexpectedly struggled in Arizona’s most high-profile races in 2022, a result that was widely attributed to the fact that their ticket was almost entirely led by candidates who prioritized election conspiracies. 

Hoping to recreate that cycle’s dynamic, Stringham on Tuesday night wasted no time appealing to GOP voters who don’t believe in Trump’s lies about the 2020 elections. 

“For all of my Republican friends who are hoping and waiting for the days of the old Republican Party to return – it isn’t,” he posted on X. “If you voted for Stephen Richer, I imagine you did so because of his honesty in the face of lies over the last four years. I’m asking you to continue to vote for the honest candidate.”

In Yuma, the other Arizona county where an incumbent Republican recorder faced a far-right challenger, the general election contest remains uncertain as of publication.

Challenger David Lara held an edge of just 77 votes over incumbent Richard Colwell out of the more than 10,000 counted as of Thursday evening.

While no Democrat appeared on the ballot, Emilia Cortez ran a write-in campaign. If the county confirms that enough voters wrote in her name, she would face Lara or Colwell in November. (Update: Lara prevailed in the final count, and Cortez gathered enough signatures to move to the general election.)

Lara has often lied about elections in Arizona, saying election fraud has taken place for “many years, wide open.” He has also floated punishing that fraud with the death penalty. His complaints helped inspire parts of the debunked film “2,000 Mules,” which is popular on the right for alleging the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The New York Times reported in 2022 that the movie drew from a purported investigation that Lara conducted alongside another county resident into election tampering.

Unlike in Maricopa County, the Yuma County recorder oversees all aspects of the elections system, so a takeover by Lara could trip up local elections and certification even more directly.

On her Wednesday commute, Cázares-Kelly, the Pima County recorder, considered what would happen if Arizona’s elections infrastructure, already under deep pressure, takes a turn to the right.

“I’m thinking about all of the wonderful people who work in elections, of my colleagues and the state elections officers who are so knowledgeable, who have decades of experience in elections and a very high level of personal accountability and passion for the work,” she said. “I’m wondering how they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, and I am deeply disappointed.”

“These conspiracy theories are very concerning, and clouding our ability to serve the public,” Cázares-Kelly added. “We have a duty to our voters in protecting the right to vote.”

Editor’s note: The article was updated with the final results in the recorder primary in Yuma County.