Richer is a Republican who won his post on an unlikely platform: to make the “Maricopa County Recorder’s Office Boring Again,” he wrote. But after the county’s 2020 votes were checked and rechecked, confirming Joe Biden’s victory, Arizona Senate Republicans launched a questionable “audit” of the ballots by a cybersecurity company. Conspiracy theorists supporting former President Donald Trump’s baseless vote fraud narrative cooked up bizarre claims — of “fake ballots flown in from South Korea” and of a deleted election database.
When Trump himself piled on with a statement repeating the lie about the missing database, Richer decided he had had enough — and tweeted, “this is unhinged.”
“It was time to loudly speak up to defend my name, my team’s name and the county’s name. It was also time to loudly speak the truth,” he wrote.
Elections have consequences
“Politics is war without bloodshed,” said the Communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, in 1938. But the future chairman of the People’s Republic of China also declared, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
