- In 2020, Stephen Richer defeated current Adrian Fontes by just over 4,000 votes.
- He promised to make the Maricopa County Recorder office boring again.
- His office maintains the county list of 2.6 million registered voters.
Stephen Richer pledged to get things boring back. And he thought he was in the best position to do so: as head of the Maricopa County Registrar’s Office, best known for processing documents, such as deeds of a property, in the metropolitan area of Maricopa. Phoenix.
But the Arizona Republican, a 30-year-old lawyer who worked in conservative and libertarian think tanks, inherited a responsibility that has made Recorder’s position much more interesting than he would like: to keep the list of registered voters of the county. This has put him and his staff at the center of complaints about the 2020 elections.
“This position has given me a front-row seat to many disturbing sides of humanity, really disturbing sides,” Richer said in a press conference Wednesday. “Our latent herd mentality; our predisposition to lie for personal gain; our predilection for violent rhetoric or even physical violence; and our extreme aggression toward the contradiction of facts and people. It has been opening my eyes “.
Earlier this month, Richer and a fellow Republican with a normally boring job, Eddie Cook, of the Maricopa County Assessment Office, issued a joint statement rejecting the claims of a right-wing activist according to which had been cast “ghost votes” from the vacant lots in the November 2020 Elections. Meanwhile, in recent months, Cyber Ninjas, a private company with no experience in election audits, intends to do so, looking at the , 1 million votes from Maricopa County evidence of massive fraud that would discredit President Joe Biden’s victory there.
Led by a conspiracy theorist who has made it clear that they believe the election was stolen, Cyber Ninjas has accused Maricopa County Republicans of trying to cover up the alleged crime, saying, for example, that they had destroyed the data. key election, a statement amplified by Former President Donald Trump said the company’s amateur details were later withdrawn, admitting that the information in question had been found on one of its own hard drives.
Aside from the details, the larger and more extensive conspiracy makes no sense, Richer said. In Maricopa County itself, he noted, “Republicans won most of the early ticket races, including mine, in which I fired the incumbent official in the county from the head of the Democrats, yes, in a race that supposedly I was ready for the Democrats. “
But now we live in an era of “diminished respect for public space professionals,” Richer said. The knowledge to counter allegations of election fraud is suspicious. It’s not enough for local election officials to count close to 47,000 votes and find “zero variances,” as happened in Maricopa County last year; to trust, one must have concluded that there was fraud, as the founder of Cyber Ninjas did. before being awarded a $ 150,000 Senate Republican-led contract from Arizona, supplemented by another $ 5.7 million in private donations.
We live in an age, Richer argued, where authority is based on the number of followers on Twitter and views on YouTube, at the expense of faith in institutions and the reliability of election results. It’s a lucrative commotion for a few, but “it also has a real human cost,” he said. “I can’t tell you the number of people on my staff who have been denigrated, [and] who have been harassed. “
In the field of politics, and now with vaccines and COVID-19, too many people trust the demagogue and the grifter, like Cyber Ninjas and their “horror show” of an audit, Richer said. , about the boring and competent.
“Interestingly, we still know the importance of professionals in our personal lives,” he said. “We still send our cars to the mechanic, our taxes to the accountant and our teeth to the dentist … And yet, in the public sphere, many now seem to favor stronger astrologers than real experts and professionals.”
After weeks of delay, it is believed that Cyber Ninjas is about to release a report on their findings. Meanwhile, Wisconsin lawmakers in Pennsylvania, inspired by example and eager to please a base that still supports the losing candidate, are devoting themselves to their own efforts to relit the 2020 results.
It is a tendency, Richer said, to undermine faith in elections and experts “will soon cause irrevocable damage, if they have not already done so.”
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