It’s sad that we’ve reached a point where honest people with integrity and passion for the work they do, lose to Republicans who are only further igniting the election denialism firestorm.
From AZmirror.com
Republican Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who spent the past three years staunchly defending elections in the county from GOP attacks, lost in the Republican primary to an opponent whose campaign was centered on criticizing the county’s election procedures.
Many Republican state and county officials in Arizona who have defended the fairness of the state’s elections appeared to have lost primary races Tuesday to challengers who campaigned at least in part on the idea of stolen or broken elections.
The apparent defeats came in key places in the state, such as Maricopa and Mohave counties, and in a race for the state Legislature, where there has been immense pressure to change how elections are run, or to even overturn election results.
The initial results suggest that unproven claims of widespread election fraud continue to have a strong hold on Republican voters in the state. And, in competitive contests, the results could lead some moderate Republican and independent voters who reject those claims to vote for Democrats in November, as happened statewide in 2022, when Democratic candidates swept top state races, said Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat.
Fontes said he believes voters in November will deliver the message that “we are moving forward, and we don’t want to have to play these shenanigans over and over and over again.”
“That, to me, is the message that voters in Arizona sent in 2022, and I have a feeling that might be the message that gets sent in 2024,” he said.
Counties have yet to finish counting ballots, including the majority of the mail ballots brought to the polls on Tuesday. Final results are expected later this week or next week.
