How Arizona’s Maricopa County Became the Battleground for Election Conspiracies

On a stifling Monday evening in August, Loretta Siwik walked into a meeting of Arizona District 12 Democrats in a suburb south of Phoenix. Siwik considers herself a “McCain Republican,” but, as the Party continued to embrace Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election had been stolen, she told me that she was “exploring.” “I don’t like the idea of a conspiracy,” she said. “It makes people too anxious.” The meeting took place at the Pecos Senior Center, a fluorescent-lit room dotted with signs promoting multigenerational bingo and beginner bridge classes. By six-thirty, the room was crowded with about a hundred people. A woman wearing a shirt that read “We may not be perfect, but they’re nuts: Vote Democrat” circulated a sign-in sheet. There was a feeling of cautious optimism in the air. The Cook Political Report had recently shifted the Presidential race in Arizona from “Lean Republican” to “Toss Up.” Days earlier, a Kamala Harris–Tim Walz rally in Glendale had drawn huge crowds. “It was a little bit like a rock concert,” one attendee told me. “We started out with this ‘We’ll do the best we can’ attitude, but now we think we can win this.”

Siwik told me that she was most interested to hear from the evening’s featured speaker, Tim Stringham, a novice politician running for an obscure but increasingly important—and increasingly contested—role: Maricopa County recorder. The recorder is partly responsible for running and certifying elections in the Phoenix area. The county is not only the biggest competitive jurisdiction in the nation, with more residents than Oregon or Iowa, but a battleground area in a battleground state. In recent years, its electoral processes have become a focus of conspiracists. The current recorder, Stephen Richer, a Republican, had been a bulwark against election deniers, but he recently lost in the primary to a MAGA-affiliated candidate. Now Siwik was eager for Stringam’s reassurance. “I’m hoping to hear that the elections are safe, and that we don’t have to worry about it,” she said.

The idea that elections are rigged, a persistent preoccupation of Trump’s, has become a defining political issue in Arizona. The Republican-led State Senate ordered an audit of the 2020 election, to be run by a Florida security company called Cyber Ninjas. After a bumbling and scandal-plagued process, the audit confirmed that Joe Biden had won the state. Eleven false electors—including two sitting lawmakers—are currently facing felony charges for their attempts to subvert the election. One election administrator, a Republican, told me that questioning election integrity has become a “litmus test” in the Party. “Almost every single Republican who defended the election system lost in the primary,” he said. “I thought it might happen, but the margins surprised me. You know, it wasn’t even really that close.”

Trump has not forgiven the Republicans who stood in his way in 2020. At a recent campaign event in Georgia, he denigrated the state’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp. “He’s a bad guy, he’s a disloyal guy, and he’s a very average governor,” Trump said. In the past four years, Trump’s allies throughout the country have maneuvered to take control of election administration. In Georgia, the State Election Board, which is controlled by Republicans, recently passed a rule that could serve as a pretext to avoid certifying election results. In Arizona, the focus has been on the recorder’s office, which Eli Crane, a Republican congressman who represents part of Maricopa County, called “one of the most important elected positions in America.” “This county race isn’t a local race,” Jake Hoffman, a state senator and the founder of the Arizona Freedom Caucus, tweeted last month, adding that the recorder has “NATIONAL” importance. Even an out-of-state politician has weighed in. Senator Mike Lee, of Utah, endorsed one of Stringham’s Republican opponents, Justin Heap, who has strategically avoided saying whether he believes that the 2020 election was stolen, although he has allied with people—most notably Kari Lake, the Arizona G.O.P.’s Senate nominee this year—who are less circumspect.

On the eve of the 2022 election, I went on a tour of the Maricopa County tabulation facility with Richer, a self-described “Reagan Republican” and a member of the Federalist Society, who had been elected as recorder two years earlier. In 2020, Trump lost Arizona by fewer than eleven thousand votes, the closest margin in the country. “For about one week, everybody loved me,” Richer told me—he was one of only a few Republicans who unseated a Democrat in the state that year. “And then somebody asked me, ‘Was the election stolen?’ And I said, ‘I haven’t seen anything to suggest that.’ ” (The recorder manages the voter rolls and is responsible for early voting, which accounts for more than three-quarters of ballots cast in the state; the county’s Board of Supervisors handles Election Day voting.)

Richer is a fan of logic puzzles, Harry Potter, and business biographies. He seemed to think that, if he just kept explaining how elections actually worked, people would eventually come around. As he walked me through the facility, his patter was practiced, but he looked exhausted. (A local journalist surveying how much time state officials spent in their offices once wrote that “none of them came anywhere close to the current county recorder,” who “might live there.”) Richer pointed out a row of high-speed tabulators behind a plate-glass window. “We had to purchase four new ones because we sent their sisters to the Cyber Ninjas,” he said. He rattled off the ways that election officials had tried to make the vote-counting process more secure and transparent: computers without access to Wi-Fi, stored in Faraday cages; a ballot vault that could suck all the oxygen out of the room in the event of a fire. “You can see everything’s exposed wiring, to be able to trace exactly where it goes,” he said. “Almost everything in this facility is under 24/7 video surveillance, and you can watch it from our Web site.”

The Republicans running for the top three statewide offices in 2022 had all dabbled in election conspiracies. They all lost. The Washington Post deemed the outcome an “utter disaster” for election deniers; it seemed, briefly, as though Arizona Republicans might have to take a different tack. Instead, many plunged even deeper into conspiracy theories, claiming that the 2022 election had been stolen, too. They directed their attacks at Richer, who in his public appearances displayed an increasingly wounded exasperation. “These were people who donated to Stephen Richer, who were friends with Stephen Richer, and so I think for him to see this incredible backlash was very personal, and very unexpected,” Stringham told me. Lake, who lost the governor’s race in 2022, was a particularly biting critic. After Richer’s defamation suit against her succeeded, she mocked him in a video. “I told my team, Let’s cut right to the chase. Where did my words hurt Mr. Richer? Show me on this doll where my words hurt you?” she said. “My words are true, but how did they hurt you?” Earlier this year, Shelby Busch, the chair of Arizona’s delegation to the Republican National Convention, was caught on tape saying, “If Stephen Richer walked in this room, I would lynch him.” (Busch later said in a statement that her words were “political hyperbole and no way meant as a threat of violence.”) A Texas man who threatened Richer is currently serving a three-and-a-half-year sentence in federal prison. “I wish someone would send a message to AZ by going after this guys kids,” the man had written.

Some Arizona Republicans who defended the integrity of recent elections have since decided to leave politics, but Richer opted to run again in 2024. At a meeting of the Sun City West Republican Club, Richer said he didn’t think that the 2020 election was stolen, and the crowd erupted in boos. At a debate this summer, Richer stood onstage with Heap and another Republican opponent, Don Hiatt, a bearded I.T. specialist. Hiatt cited the debunked election-conspiracy film “2000 Mules.” “Ballots can be injected into the system,” he warned darkly. Heap had made questioning the electoral system one of his key issues during his one term as a state representative. When asked at the debate if the 2020 election was stolen, Hiatt said yes, but Heap hedged. “What I can say is that . . . there were inconsistencies and illegalities that happened,” he said. “The voters have lost confidence in the system. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what I might think about the system if a substantial portion of our voters no longer trust that their ballots are being taken care of, that their voices are being heard.” Richer’s frustration seemed to briefly overwhelm him. “I appreciate that Don at least has the courage to say yes,” he said. “But Justin stood here again and he hemmed and he hawed, he didn’t give you a yes or no, and I would suggest that that is what is damaging to confidence of voters in Arizona.” Six days later, Heap won the primary, by nearly nine points. (Richer and Hiatt received about thirty-five and twenty-two per cent of the vote, respectively.) One of Richer’s final tasks in office will be to administer early voting in this year’s election. Election Day voting will be run by Jack Sellers, a veteran Republican politician and the chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, who was ousted in his primary by an election questioner.

Since Richer’s defeat, attention has turned to Stringham, a thirty-five-year-old Army veteran. I sat down with him in the office of the Maricopa County Democratic Party, where one wall was plastered with campaign signs reading “Stringham: Veteran for Recorder.” Stringham is wonky and self-deprecating, and seemed to have some ambivalence about his new role as a politician. “We can talk as long as you like,” he told me. “When I’m not talking to you, they make me go call people.” Two years ago, when the executive director of the county Party tried to recruit him to run for office, Stringham thought about it for a few weeks, then declined. “He said, ‘You know, we thought if anybody would do it, it’d be an Afghan-war veteran. If you don’t want to, I understand—just remember, on November 6th, that I asked you,’ ” Stringham recalled. He and his wife drove home from the meeting mostly in silence. Soon, he decided to go for it.

If Richer attempted to win over skeptical voters with facts and logic, Stringham seems to think that basic competence and decency will do it. “You’re a midlevel county bureaucrat,” he said. “It’s very administrative, and it’s not a partisan thing. But we’ve gone to a strange place.” He knew that winning the election would require persuading people who might otherwise resist voting for a Democrat. (Maricopa County is split almost evenly between registered Republicans, Democrats, and independents, although Democrats make up the smallest share.) “My staff knows that the word ‘fight’ does not appear in my e-mails. I think it’s inappropriate in politics,” he said. “So how do we get people excited about the recorder’s race while at the same time trying to be genuine and inoffensive and productive? It’s, like, ‘Democracy’s on the line—but be cool!’ ‘This is really important—but stay calm!’ ”

As election administration grows more politicized, Stringham told me, he worries about losing institutional knowledge in local government. “It’s very easy to break things,” he said. But he could also imagine more urgent consequences if Heap is elected: “If you are answerable to this very vehement minority that is dead set on ‘Either we will win or you will reject the election findings,’ are we going to get to where you’d have Maricopa County just not certify the election?”

This kind of “political doomsday scenario,” as Stringham called it, is not as far-fetched as it might seem. Multiple Arizonans appeared on a list of “rogue election officials” who refused to certify results, assembled by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan legal watchdog group. In 2022, two supervisors in Cochise County, a rural area along the border with Mexico, initially pushed for a full hand count and refused to certify the election results. The courts eventually intervened, and the supervisors there are now facing criminal charges. Cochise County is small enough that the rebellion didn’t derail the electoral process, but a similar refusal to certify the results in Maricopa County—which has about thirty times as many registered voters as Cochise and supplies a majority of the state’s Democratic votes—could potentially send Arizona’s electoral votes into a protracted legal limbo.

After Stringham spoke at the Pecos Senior Center, I talked with Clyde Parks, a retired engineer and a Navy veteran, who used to vote Republican. He told me he appreciated that Stringham was a fellow-veteran. “Is he qualified? I’m not sure yet,” he said. “He didn’t speak to what he’s done to make him qualified. But, if his opponent is what he says he is, then I’ll vote for him even if he’s not qualified.” ♦