Far-right state Rep. Justin Heap announced Wednesday that he was launching a challenge against Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a fellow Republican who has infuriated election conspiracy theorists during his tenure as election administrator for Arizona's largest county.
Heap entered the July 30 primary with the support of state Sen. Jake Hoffman, a fraudulent elector for Donald Trump in 2020 who, along with Heap, unsuccessfully tried to pass a bill last year to gerrymander Maricopa into four separate counties to ensure Republicans would remain in control of three of them.
The state representative has teased a far larger endorsement, however. The Washington Post's Yvonne Wingett Sanchez reported just before his kickoff that Heap told a crowd gathered at the age-restricted community Leisure World that Donald Trump would be backing him.
Heap, who like Hoffman belongs to the state's branch of the Freedom Caucus, appears to have avoided statements expressing direct support for election denialism, but he's promoted legislation supported by conspiracy theorists. Among other things, he's sponsored a bill to bar Arizona's participation in "any multistate voter registration or voter registration list maintenance organization," as well as a measure making it easier for election results to be challenged in court.
Hoffman is also not the only Big Lie promoter with whom Heap has associated himself. Another ally is Abraham Hamadeh, an extremist who refused to concede after losing the 2022 race for attorney general to Democrat Kris Mayes. Despite Hamadeh's repeated failures to have his loss overturned, Heap expressed sympathy for his position, claiming last year that Hamadeh's goal was only to "know who the real winner is." (Hamadeh is currently running for the open 8th Congressional District.)
Richer won the recorder's office in 2020 by unseating Democratic incumbent Adrian Fontes in a tight 50.1-49.9 race. His victory put the Republicans back in control of the post that oversees elections in a county that's home to about 60% of the state's population. That win came even as Joe Biden was taking Maricopa County 50-48, which made him the first Democratic presidential nominee to prevail here since Harry Truman in 1948.
The new recorder, though, quickly infuriated Trumpists by establishing himself as an ardent opponent of the Big Lie. Richer, as Vox's Zack Beauchamp recounted in January, was often heckled when he appeared at party gatherings, including one at which attendees tried to stop him from leaving by "yanking on his arms and shoulders, to berate him about the allegedly stolen 2020 election."
Richer continued his efforts to debunk election lies and administer contests even in the face of death threats. Indeed, Beauchamp says that on the day they spoke, Richer "was about to testify in one of three federal cases against people who had vowed to kill him."
Election deniers continued their attacks on the recorder following Republican Kari Lake's narrow loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs in 2022's race for governor. (Fontes was elected to replace Hobbs as secretary of state in that same election.)
Richer, who went on to sue Lake for defamation, caustically greeted her decision to run for the Senate this cycle. "Just a reminder that if you really believed that the 2020 and 2022 elections were rigged and controlled by the people behind the curtain, thereby depriving the candidate of all agency, you wouldn't rationally run for election in 2024," he tweeted.
But while Lake is on track to easily win the July GOP primary, Richer expressed confidence that he'd prevail that same day against Heap, who launched his campaign after three other Republicans had already filed paperwork to gather signatures ahead of the April 1 deadline.
"I'm the only one who already has the signatures, has raised more money than all other candidates combined by a lot, has countywide name ID and has shown I can win a competitive general election," he told the Arizona Republic.
The only Democrat in the race is Tim Stringham, an Army and Navy veteran who told Axios in December he was skeptical that Richer would even make it through the primary. Stringham also took Richer to task for his work on a Republican-commissioned audit of the 2018 general election that highlighted election conspiracy theories about Fontes even as it concluded the Democrat hadn't broken any laws.
Richer’s reelection campaign comes at a time when both mainstream Democrats and Republican election deniers are each hoping to take control of the five-member board of supervisors that governs Maricopa County.
Two of the three supervisors who were censured along with Richer last year by the county Republican Party—Bill Gates and Clint Hickman—are retiring. The third, Supervisor Tom Galvin, is seeking reelection, but he faces a primary challenge from former state Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, who sponsored aggressive voting restrictions in Arizona following the 2020 elections.
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